Back to Basics in SOE reform

Turnaround Of Indian Railways

Indian Railways is the worlds largest employer and one of the biggest and busiest rail networks in the world, carrying some 17 million people and more than one million tonnes of freight daily. It was, however, until very recently, a loss-making organisation heading for bankruptcy. Starting his term in 2004 with a budget of just $200 million with which to save the national institution, Indian Railways Minister, Lalu Prasad engineered a dramatic turnaround. In 2007, Indian Railways revenues amounted to $6 billion. This impressive success story has also been featured in the textbooks of prestigious academic institutes worldwide as a case study. Minister Lalu Prasad is a key ally of India's governing coalition led by the Congress party. He was also the former Chief Minister of the state of Bihar which his Rashtriya Janata Dal party governed for 13 years until 2005.

SOEs in GFS

To this end, the government is making the commitment to a new PSI benchmark of compiling the official statistics of Other Economic Flows for the general public sector arising from the holding gains with our five largest state-owned enterprises to allow for prompt detection of balance-sheet vulnerabilities and adoption of corrective actions.

-Cape Verde: Letter of Intent, Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, and Technical Memorandum of Understanding

Related;
The Basics of Macroeconomic Accounts

SOEs Performance in Indonesia

-Indonesia: State-Owned Enterprise Governance and Privatization Program

Heard about the Kiwi Bureacrats

A correspondent from The Telegraph writes;

The scene of this madness was the Takaka post office which is where ‘rural' households like ours must go to pick up their mail from a bank of rusting old Post Office Boxes.

Recently I concluded some additional business with my landlord who asked me to put a copy of our new rental contract into his PO Box so that he could collect it next time he was passing through town.

So in I pop to the post office to ask the man behind the counter if he would put the envelope into Box No ‘xxx' when they were next being stuffed with the morning mail - the box in question was no more than ten paces from where he was standing -.

He shook his head with the helpless solemnity.

"Sorry, mate. You'll need a stamp."

I pointed at the address on the envelope.

"It's just going in one of the boxes."

"Sorry, mate. You'll need a stamp. That'll be a dollar-fifty."

I looked at him, searching for the hint of a smile. Nothing.

"You've got to be joking, right? That ‘delivery' is ten paces. That's fifteen cents a metre..."

"Sorry, Mate. What kind of business do you think we're running. Dollar-fifty."

I was so shocked, I paid the man his money. Even as I type this, I can't quite understand why.

As if it's any consolation, he explained that my freshly stamped letter will now travel ‘over the hill' to the Nelson sorting office, where it will be sorted and returned to him behind the Takaka post office counter.

Only then, two days and several hundred kilometers later, will the man behind the post office counter shuffle the required ten paces over to the bank of PO Boxes and put my letter in the relevant PO Box.