A Comparative Study of the Civil Service of Hong Kong and Singapore

Download or read book A Comparative Study of the Civil Service of Hong Kong and Singapore written by Ada Hin and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "A Comparative Study of the Civil Service of Hong Kong and Singapore" by Ada, Hin, 禤雅儀, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract The civil service system, being an important agency for carrying out the policies and measures of a government, is receiving more and more attention in recent years. Significant developments and modernization programs to improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy have been carried out in many countries. In this paper, we work to examine and study the civil service of two small but efficient economic entities in Asia - Hong Kong and Singapore. By smoothly and honestly implementing the government policies, the civil services in these two cities have indeed contributed to the remarkable societal and economic developments in the 1980s and 1990s. By comparing the two civil service systems, we can identify a number of features that they have in common, including the administration by generalists, the efforts for localization and the determination to combat corruption within the civil service systems. With increasing demands and expectations of the government service, both Singapore and Hong Kong have designed and carried out different kinds of civil service reforms to cope with the new environment. Their reform measures include various types of changes, such as adjusting the conditions of service, 3remuneration of the civil servants and introducing new kinds of training and development programs. These measures aim at increasing the efficiency of the system, cultivating a service culture into the minds of the civil servants, as well as solving immediate problems and challenges facing the governments such as reducing governmental financial burden by adjusting the scale for salary payment of the civil servants. Finally, after briefly evaluating these reforms, a number of pitfalls and successful examples are illustrated. It is hoped that by examining these lessons learnt, adequate directions for future civil service management could be more easily identified. It is also the purpose of this paper to bring more insights in improving the civil service efficiency for other governments in Asia by taking the experiences of Hong Kong and Singapore as a reference. 4 DOI: 10.5353/th_b2951877 Subjects: Civil service - China - Hong Kong Civil service - Singapore