World Bank-OPDC knowledge partnership agreement

Speech by Annette Dixon
Country Director, World Bank, Thailand
At the signing of the
Memorandum of Understanding between
The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), and
The Office of the Public Sector Development Commission
Thursday 6th August, 2009
OPDC, Bangkok
--------------------------------------

Dr. Thosaporn, Secretary General of the Office of the Public Sector Development Commission; Distinguished guests; Ladies and gentlemen:

It gives me great pleasure to be with you here this afternoon at the signing ceremony of this Memorandum of Understanding between the OPDC and the World Bank on a program of knowledge sharing and collaboration on a range of important public sector reform initiatives.

The World Bank has enjoyed a long standing partnership with Thailand on economic development for over 60 years. This partnership has spanned a range of sectors and covered many challenging issues, including those related to human and social development, infrastructure, and public sector development.

On public sector reform, the World Bank has been working with Thailand consistently since 1999 to strengthen economic management capacity, implementation of strategic performance based budgeting reforms, and implementation of related reforms. The Royal Decree on Good Governance of 2003 provided a very consistent framework that the World Bank has strived to support via our Country Development Partnership on Governance and Public Sector Reforms since 2003 to-date.

The World Bank is now developing a new Country Partnership Strategy for the next two years. A key objective of this CPS will be to support Thailand in navigating through the current Global Financial Crisis, and to continue strengthening public sector to be able to provide better services to citizens. In this regard, OPDC will be a key knowledge partner and this Memorandum of Understanding will be a vehicle for our two institutions to deepen our collaboration in a more systematic and strategic manner.

We recognize that the OPDC has been facilitating public sector reforms aimed at improving service delivery since 2002 and has achieved significantly important milestones. The implementation of the Key Performance Indicators framework across the public sector stands out as a particularly impressive achievement and one where Thailand is at the cutting edge of public sector performance enhancement reforms.

Many of our member countries wish to learn from Thailand’s development experience, and we appreciate the fact that the OPDC has also agree to participate in peer-to-peer knowledge exchange activities with other countries and to share the successes and challenges faced by Thailand with other countries that are striving to implement reforms that Thailand has already undertaken.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are looking forward to working with Thailand on some very interesting issues within the MOU. For example, the Role of the State project that OPDC is undertaking is both interesting in terms of the concept and challenging in terms of its scope. Such work will potentially lead to the generation of knowledge that will be beneficial to Thailand, as well as other countries. In this regard I note that later today the team from OPDC will be kicking off this collaboration with a video conference with members of the World Bank’s Global Expert Team on Public Sector Reforms.

I would like to end by thanking the OPDC in hosting this ceremony today. We look forward to successful implementation of the MOU and wish the team Godspeed in their endeavors.