Human
resource management in the public sector is often neglected in Latin America
because it can be politically very sensitive. But it is crucial for institutional
effectiveness and, over the medium term, for legitimacy too. What public
policies and public services can achieve depends heavily on the quality of the civil
service. Moreover, public sector human resource management an field in which the
region certainly has room for improvement.
Our recent
book: “Serving Citizens: A Decade of Civil
Service Reforms in Latin America (2004-2013)”
analyses
how human resource management has evolved in the civil service in sixteen Latin
American countries during the last decade. The methodology is based on the Ibero-American Charter
for the Public Service, signed by these countries back in 2003, and which
was applied in 2004 and 2013.
What did we find? The
region made progress in the last ten years, but not as much as we hoped when
the Charter was signed. The regional average performance moved from 30 to 38
points out of 100. This average hides significant disparities among countries. One
group has improved substantially, typically from a low base. This group
includes El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Peru, but its rate of
improvement leads us also to classify Chile in this group even though it started
with a high score. Another group of countries has made less progress. This
group includes Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, all of which
began from high or at least medium level scores. However, it also includes Bolivia,
Guatemala and Honduras which started from lower initial scores.
