bureaucracy and initiatives

Bureaucracy can be painful for the same reason why legal disputes exist: Logical if-then statements can exhaust only so many possibilities. Reality will always surprise you with more possibilities than you can write down.

The reason why bureaucracies work smoother in advanced economies is not because developed countries are better at building systems. They just have a better work ethic, that is all.

You can give people with a better work ethic more space to manoeuvre. In other words, you can comfortably cut the number of if-then statements, underdetermine your system and give initiative to your bureaucrats. Less number of rules translate into less possibility of generating absurd contradictions and ping-pong processes. Common sense prevails.

There is a strong correlation between work ethic and economic development, but the road up the graph is laden with chicken-and-egg problems for developing countries. Governments can not trust their own bureaucrats and therefore increase the number of if-then statements, which in turn leads to dysfunctionalities and more bribe offers by citizens to get things done, which in turn corrupts the bureaucrats and attracts more corrupt people into bureaucracy...