Suchergebnisse

Kenya's civil service expanded rapidly after independence, becoming by far the largest in East Africa. Following economic decline since the 1980s, however, it became difficult for the government to sustain a large and inefficient public sector. To raise efficiency, extensive civil service reforms and changes in its incentive structure were necessary to reflect the government's new priorities. The main factors affecting performance in the civil service include low salaries and allowances for the civil servants, lack of equipment and office space, poor compensation, absence of a career-development structure, and poor delegation. This paper examines factors affecting efficiency in the Kenyan civil service with emphasis on incentive structures, ranging from wage emoluments, training and promotion procedures and sanctions against poor performance. Several incentive realignments for improving efficiency in the civil service emerge. First, salaries and other emoluments of the civil service should be improved to a level deemed conducive to increasing morale and productivity and maintained to preserve it in real terms via periodic reviews and in line with macroeconomic developments. The existing huge gaps between government and private sector wages for highly skilled workers should be narrowed to enable the government to retain its productive staff. Currently, retrenchments are used to reduce the size of the civil service and to improve productivity, but the government has been too slow in improving its working conditions so as to realise positive impacts of a smaller and flexible civil service. Second, the civil service in Kenya needs to adopt modern management techniques such as performance evaluation, career planning, utilization and effective delegation to enable it achieve efficiency gains in service delivery. In addition, job descriptions and evaluations of job performance should be integrated to the professionalization of the civil service to engender meritocracy in appraisal of individual staff performance. Finally, improved performance by the civil servants with adequate and well-maintained office infrastructure requires an increase in the proportion of government expenditure on equipment and general maintenance. – incentives ; civil service ; Kenya

AbstractSince the 1980s, Kenya has been gradually integrating with the global economy. Using both industry‐level and firm‐level data, the paper examines the effects of globalization on employment and earnings in the Kenyan manufacturing sector. The industry‐level analysis suggests that the overall effect of international trade on manufacturing employment has been negative in the 1990s. The firm‐level analysis indicates that less skilled workers experienced losses in earnings, and that the inequality in earnings between skilled and unskilled workers increased during this period. This suggests that globalization has been associated with adverse labour market outcomes in Kenya. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractThis study utilized employee–employer datasets 1993 to 1995 to investigate the presence of export wage premium and its impact on wage inequality within the Kenya's manufacturing sector. Panel estimations were conducted using the Mincerian wage regressions with fixed effects, adjusting the standard errors of estimators to accommodate potential correlation of error terms across workers in manufacturing firms. Additionally, we decompose the GINI coefficient by categories of earnings to get the marginal effects. Furthermore, the quantile regression analysis was used to show the wage distribution. The results revealed an export premium of 11 percent in the manufacturing sector upon incorporating workers' characteristics in the estimations. The export wage premium was associated with workers possessing secondary and university education. Furthermore, participating in the export sector contributes to an increase in wage inequality of 1.42 percent within the manufacturing sector. Moreover, the study found that workers with university education received export wage premium in the lower quantiles, whereas those with secondary education experienced it in the upper quantiles, albeit to a lesser extent, contributing to wage inequality.

Health inputs are critical in attaining a healthy nation and improving health outcomes. Kenya, like other developing countries, grapples with limited health expenditures and poor population health indicators. Specifically, Kenya is yet to achieve the allocation of least 15% of the government's annual budget to improve the health sector as enshrined in the Abuja Declaration. Though there is an improvement with regards to infant mortality rate decreasing from 96.6 per 1, 000 live birth in 1970 to 30.6 per 1, 000 live birth in 2018. This indicator of population health outcome is currently far below the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target of reducing the under five mortality rate to as low as 12 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2030. The literature suggests that increase in government's budgetary allocation to the health sector can improve country's health outcomes. Evidence on the impact of health expenditures on health outcomes is mixed and limited in developing countries. This study aims to analyze the impact of public health expenditures on health outcomes, among other control variables in Kenya. The study uses time series data from 1970 to 2018. The variables are found to be integrated of different orders suggesting the choice of Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. ARDL provides a useful link between long run equilibrium relationships and short run disequilibrium dynamics is estimated. The ARDL bounds test suggests presence of cointegration thus leading to the estimation of Error Correction Model (ECM). The findings suggest that improvements in public health expenditures enhance health outcomes in Kenya. The control variablesthat are found to be important determinants of infant mortality rate in Kenya include the national income and number of hospital beds per 100, 000. The study recommends that Kenyan government should increase annual budgetary allocation to health sector. Such increase is likely to lead to investments in physical and human capital in the health sector thus translating to improved health outcomes in Kenya.

Household surveys provide data that are used for identifying and measuring the poverty status of households and individuals. However, carrying out such surveys is expensive, especially in poor developing countries. Thus it is important to make maximum use of the available survey data in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper develops a simple method for using poverty indices derived from survey data for a given year, to predict poverty rates for subsequent periods without having to conduct a new household survey. (InWent/DÜI)