• Home
• News Article

Mitri: Lebanon faces urgent need to modernize public sector

11 June 2010

BEIRUT: Information Minister Tarek Mitri said Thursday that Lebanon is still lagging behind when it comes to the modernization of the public sector.

“The challenge of modernizing our public sector is great and we won’t be able to meet this challenge unless a partnership between the private and public sectors as well as the academic world was created,” he said.

Mitri added that there is a lot to learn from the private sector as far as modernization goes. “We have to be able to take advantage of the experience of people in the academic community,” he said.

He said the government has reiterated in a policy statement some general principles about efficiency accountability, transparency and the need to have human resources policy which was never available in the public service. “Let’s hope that this time we don’t just reiterate principles but try to achieve a number of measurable objectives.”

Mitri, who was representing Prime Minister Saad Hariri, said that the government is late with the 2010 budget because it wants to make sure that some of these statements about e-government, a knowledge-based economy and the rest are not simply principles. “We want them to find their way into the budget, and into concrete ministerial programs and priorities.”

Mitri’s remarks came during the opening of the 8th international on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) held at the American University of Beirut. The conference, which was attended by high government officials, bankers and academics from over 30 countries in the world, aims at discussing the importance of applying DEA to performance management and measurement in both public and private sectors.

DEA is a relatively new “data oriented” approach for evaluating the performance of a set of peer entities called Decision Making Units (DMUs) which convert multiple inputs into multiple outputs.

Associate professor Ibrahim Osman defined DEA as being “an ongoing management improvement process of the overall health of an organization unit by comparison to best practices of peer alternatives.”

Osman underlined the importance of DEA by saying that companies who employ these techniques can better achieve their goals. “Around 45 percent of people make decisions according to their feelings and hence, 67 percent of companies who are supposed to be more efficient than governments achieve only 60 percent of their goals,” he said.

He added that productivity is hindered by using inappropriate tools for decision making. “Anyone can make a decision but to make the wrong decision is very expensive,” he said.

Osman also called on the Prime Minister and his representative to establish a center aimed at improving decision making in the country. According to Osman, the average spending on research and development in the region constitute only 0.2 percent of GDP while R&D spending in the world reached 2.5 percent of GDP.

For his part, Rajev Banker, Merves Chair in accounting and technology at Fox school, explained that DEA is developed with the objective of combining rigorous theories with application in the real world. “Most of the developments in DEA have been motivated by problems faced by managers in businesses or policy makers in governmental and other positions around the world,” he said.

Other speakers also included Provost Ahmad Dallal and OSB Associate Dean Khalil Hindi. At the end of the opening ceremony, a gift of appreciation was handed to Mitri, who received it on behalf of Hariri.

© Copyright The Daily Star 2010.