Structure

Development
Administration in
Developed and Developing
Nations
regime under the Fifth Republic while Germany, even after unification, has not 
encountered any political traumas.
A positive outcome of political stability can be seen in the equilibrium existing 
between the political system (or the ‘constitutive system, in Riggsian 
terminology) and its administrative subsystem. There has been almost a balance 
of power between these two significant components of government. The 
respective roles of the two are clear: The constitutive system is performing, inter-
alia, the critical role of law-making and policy formulation, while the 
bureaucratic system has been primarily engaged in the process of rule-
implementation and providing crucial assistance to the constitutive system in the 
performance of its functions. Consequently, there is a mutual respect for each 
other’s roles and the cases of boundary-violation or role-conflict are a few and 
far-between. This has led to a healthy environment in the governance system. It 
is opined by most Western scholars that development administration is facilitated 
in a balanced polity.
Above, then, are a few shared characteristics of development administration in 
the more developed nations. Let us now consider the most noticeable features of 
development administration in developing countries. 
4.3 THE DEVELOPING NATIONS 
A critical difficulty in discussing the status of development administration in 
developing countries is the phenomenal heterogeneity in the environmental 
context, structures, behavioural patterns and outputs of the administrative system 
of these countries. There are prominent variations in the levels of political, 
economic, social, cultural and technological development in the so-called 
“developing nations” that cover geographically, a major part of the globe. Most 
nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America will fall in this category. Exceptions 
are, however, too obvious to be ignored. While Japan has joined the big league of 
developed nations, South Korea is not too behind. But most notably, the People’s 
Republic of China is leaping towards the status of a Super-power and the Asian 
Tigers are not comfortable in the company of Nepal, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. 
Thus, the variations in their level of socio-economic development create 
categories within the broader category of developing nations. And then there are 
countries such as North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam, which still value certain 
attributes of Communism, while there are nations like India and Philippines that 
have honoured the tenets of parliamentary democracy.