The role of a public corporation in development: An evaluation of the West Pakistan agricultural development corporation

Abstract

Dismayed by the red tape of the government departments, the third-world governments have increasingly resorted to the creation of parastatal organisations for the implementation of their development programmes. With a view to determining the success or otherwise of this approach, the performance of a parastatal organisation, namely the West Pakistan Agricultural Development Corporation (1961–1972) has been analysed in this paper. While it is generally recognised that, in order to be effective, the parastatal organisation must enjoy an adequate degree of financial and administrative flexibility, under the prevailing government structures the governments have found it difficult to vest this in the public corporations. Although the WPADC had achieved a fair degree of success, it might have achieved better results if it had been given an adequate financial and administrative autonomy by the government and if it had institutionalised a monitoring, evaluation and feedback system. Although, given these two factors, the parastatal organisations could perform better than the regular government departments, it should not be forgotten that the parastatal organisations also operate under the same overall national constraints as the government departments.