Performance of Real Estate Bureaucracy

This chapter provides a testing of classical public choice ideas about the propensity of public bureaucracies to maximise their budgets at the expense of efficient and economic provision of public services. It tests these arguments in a quantitative analysis of budgetary allocations in five government land related services delivery bureaucracies in Ghana. These bureaucracies are chosen because firstly they are representative of public bureaucracies in Ghana generally in terms of their budgetary, governance, salary and employment attributes. As well, Ghana presents an interesting story of a developing country struggling since independence to contrive for itself a workable and efficient land related service delivery bureaucracies. Presently, the World Bank and other development partners such as the DFID are sponsoring US$55 million towards improving land service delivery Ghana dubbed the Ghana Land Administration Project (see Hatch, 2001). It is anticipated that lessons learnt from the Ghana experience will inform other initiatives of the World Bank and other international development partners in other developing societies with social structures and land tenure systems that are similar to those of Ghana.