Tournament Approaches to Policy Reform: Making Development Assistance More Effective

3. Review of Certification Experience

54 The novelty of a tournament for government transfers, reforms, or as an aid delivery vehicle means that the number of PIJC applications is limited. Therefore, in section 2.5, we proposed a two-tiered approach that would enable past experience to be used to its fullest for assessing PIJC. This chapter and the next one constitute the first tier of this approach, which applies the selection process discussed in section 2.6 and assessment framework explained in section 2.5 to representative PIJC applications. Real-world cases of certification are evaluated here; real-world tournaments are evaluated in chapter 4. In both instances the operative mechanism is a competition. And to reiterate the caution in section 1.4, because few careful evaluations of tournaments exist, the present research could not engage in the statistical rigor necessary for definitive judgments about success or failure; any lessons learned, therefore, are tentative. Chapter 5 presents the second tier of the approach, briefly examining some of the experience sponsors and reformers have had on a sectoral basis when using the constituent components of the PIJC approach in their project designs. The idea of this review is to augment the limited track record of PIJC by examining the experience with its constituent components and from that determine how much confidence to put in the PIJC process. In all cases the discussion endeavors to make a clear distinction between judgments on the appropriateness of the PIJC design selected for the application and on what actually happened. Furthermore, after considering what might have happened under a different mechanism or condition, the discussion then examines the feasibility of the alternative under the actual conditions the sponsor-designer Review of Certification Experience 3 11601-03_Ch03-rev.qxd 5/4/09 11:23 AM Page 54 review of certification experience 55 faced at the time. (Section 6.5 reveals that one can often gain insights into the sponsor’s situation through such thought experiments.) 3.1 Simple Certification Simple certification is the most common type of competition. Four examples were selected from Romania, India, Indonesia, and USAID and examined according to the assessment framework described in section 2.5. Recall that a simple certification is where a player must satisfactorily complete a preestablished set of tasks or achieve a preset level of performance. In addition to meeting the criteria set forth in section 2.6, these examples were selected because they permit particularly good comparisons within and across mechanisms. For example, the certification in Romania (below) and the tournaments in Russia and Morocco (chapter 4) are applications with similar objectives and players, but there is no pecuniary reward or pressure to excel in the former. The USAID certification (below) and the MCC tournament (chapter 4) have similar objectives, but their respective incentives target different stakeholders. The Indian and Indonesian certifications illustrate different designs to achieve similar regulatory ends. 3.1.1 Romania: “Simple and Fast” Deregulation Competition This example from Romania is very interesting because it follows quite closely the ideal construction of what we called a complete PIJC in chapter 1, but with two exceptions: lack of pecuniary reward and use of certification instead of tournament design. As a result, this application illustrates, on the one hand, how much one can achieve with a simplified PIJC design and, on the other hand, the potential limitations of using nonpecuniary rewards. statement of the problem Registering and operating an SME in Romania has been fraught with bureaucratic and regulatory obstacles throughout the period of transition.1 The results of prior efforts by the donors to address these problems have been spotty, perhaps due to the centralized nature of government or to arbitrary reform efforts “from above.” objective Begun on July 25, 2000, the five-step deregulation competition entitled “Simple and Fast” had the goal of building an effective private-public partnership of funding, implementing, and participating parties who would then work together 1. The description of the objectives, methods, and results of this application draws on Clement and Ashbrook (2001). 11601-03_Ch03-rev.qxd 5/4/09 11:23 AM Page 55 56 review of certification experience to reduce the time and effort necessary to obtain approvals and other related site development authorizations needed to operate and register SMEs in Romania. sponsor and implementers The IRIS Center of the University of Maryland conceived and launched the program in collaboration with the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina and...