A few days ago, former Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) minister Sung Yu-hsieh (宋餘俠) delivered a report at a meeting of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Central Standing Committee describing how the commission would be transformed into the National Development Council, which became active on Wednesday.
Sung said that as of May 20 last year, 401 of the 414 policy promises — 96.9 percent — made by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) since coming into office in 2008 had been implemented and yielded partial results.
The standards used to measure success in this evaluation were “completed,” “currently being carried out” and “in planning.”
After the 96.9 percent figure was questioned, then-vice minister of the RDEC Tai Hao-chun (戴豪君) responded by saying that the results of this evaluation were indeed quite different from what the public perceives as being the case and that the system used for such evaluations will be adjusted in the future.
It is not reasonable to claim that a president with a 9.2 percent approval rating can have delivered on 96.9 percent of his policy promises.
When it comes to evaluating the success of a president’s policies, attention should be placed on the most important policies, with preference given to quality rather than quantity. For example, Ma previously declared that this year would be a breakthrough year for the nation’s economy.
However, last year, Taiwan’s economic growth rate was adjusted downward 10 times by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, and the last adjustment put economic growth for the year at less than 2 percent. How are we supposed to calculate the success rate for such a figure — it indicates that Ma did not even manage to deliver half of what he had originally promised for the year.
It also raises other questions, such as what the commission means by “being carried out” and “in planning” and how they calculate the implementation success rate of a policy. None of these issues has been made clear and this state of affairs runs counter to the spirit and methods of management by objective.
Officials should carry out assessments on the major short, mid and long-term impact of the policies they draw up and enact. This is the only way they can improve the standards of living for the public, further national development and come up with stable follow-up policies. They cannot look at their jobs as something that merely involves trying to guess what their superiors want in order to please them. This attitude will make people feel that these officials are useless when it comes to improving Taiwanese society and increasing national competitiveness. Therefore, government officials must take the utmost care. After all, they are the ones who essentially decide the shape of our society.
Kuo Chen-hero is an adjunct professor of economics at Soochow University.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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