Institutions and growth in Korea and Taiwan: The bureaucracy

How do competent bureaucracies emerge in developing countries? We examine bureaucratic reform in Korea and Taiwan and argue that in both cases political leaders had an interest in reforming the civil service to carry out their programmatic initiatives. In addition, both governments undertook organisational reforms that made certain parts of the bureaucracy more meritocratic, while utilising centralised and insulated pilot agencies’ in overall policy coordination. However, we reject the approach to bureaucratic reform that focuses primarily on its efficiency‐enhancing effects. If delegation, bureaucratic and policy reform provided an easily available solution to the authoritarian's dilemma, dictators would have more uniformly positive economic records. Rather, we analyse the political and institutional constraints under which governing elites operate. In doing so, we underscore several important variations in the design of bureaucratic organisation, which in turn mirror larger policy differences between the two countries.