Trends in Administrative Reform in Brazil
In almost all the developing countries 'planning' has become the open sesame to an industrial future. Private enterprise, it has been argued, is either incapable or unwilling to provide the investment necessary to develop the world,' and therefore the task must be carried out by the state, acting through a wide variety of ministries, nationalized corporations, and 'mixed' businesses in which the state is the main shareholder. But making a plan is not the same thing as carrying it out, as most of the nations of the Third World have discovered to their cost. A new and highly sophisticated administrative structure will be necessary to carry out the national plan, and the existing government systems, which are mostly based on foundations laid when the responsibilities of the central government were very much smaller, are mostly inadequate. This dilemma can be seen most obviously in the case of Brazil, where a strenuous and partially successful effort has been made to reform the administration and to fit it for its new tasks. What lessons can be learnt from the successes and failures of the administrative reform in Brazil?