The role of bureaucracy in economic development in Argentina - Essay Example

Though bureaucracy in administration whether public or governmental has always given rise to many problems, but still there are hopes that a "brand new" bureaucracy has a long way to go towards economic development and consolidation of its institutions (Ducote, World Governance Survey) In circumstances where the slow process of Argentina's economic decline which intensified after World War II remained unable to get back to the colonial times, after 1853 was modernized. The early 20th century was the most favourable time when amazing progress was carried out at the political and economic level.

Despite attaining independence from Spain, Argentina after spending many decades under the influence of Spanish democratic government continued with constitution with the old colonial features which began to reappear in Argentine administration (Hamilton, 2005). The integrated formulation predicts that the shift from populist authoritarian rule (1952) and to bureaucratic-authoritarian rule (1966) should not have produced fundamental policy changes in certain areas. These areas comprised of military in ad hoc provision, welfare and public works programs and a depoliticized system.

By the early 1950s, cabinet instability had become chronic with a large scale development of a highly unionized public bureaucracy. The bureaucracy caused many problems like development of the cyclical balance-of-payments, foreign exchange. The economic inflation problems along with a combination of the cumbersome and inefficient public bureaucracy caused drainage of the resources elites had at their command (Most & Rienner, 1991, p. 67). Despite the impressive economic achievements since Independence, the re-emergence of colonial practices condemned Argentina to a trajectory of underdevelopment that could not be reversed by the democratic administrations of the 1990s.

Background - The role of Military in Bureaucracy Military organizations were complex bureaucracies that uphold functional divisions. Those divisions affect not only the ways in which the military organizes work but also the ways in which it may fracture in the face of other kinds of challenges. (Norden, 1996, p. 108) The ad hoc military's role in the government should have been largely provisional. The size and complexity of the government should have increased as a result of the initiation and expansion of a variety of welfare and public works programs during the populist period without any concerted efforts to reorganize or control the growing bureaucracy.

The impact of such developments on the bureaucratic-authoritarian coalition of the post-1966 period should have attempted to establish an exclusionary and depoliticized system. The military members of the bureaucratic authoritarian coalition should have unified themselves and taken control of the government with a view to establishing a more or less permanent military dictatorship. The technocrats of the bureaucratic authoritarian coalition should have rejected the political bargaining, electioneering, and pressure group politics that distorted earlier efforts at objective policymaking.

The technocrats therefore decided to reorganize the state, increase its operating efficiency, and 'rationalize' its policymaking. The shift from the autocratic to bureaucratic Government was not supposed to have produced fundamental