Catalog

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p. 5 of 25 BACK | NEXT Introduction Background Evolution of resident missions Current responsibilities and functions Current organization, staffing, and costs Achievements and constraints The need for change Practices of other multilateral development banks Policy framework Organizational and resource issues Recommendation

Resident Mission Policy : Background

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Current organization, staffing, and costs

The current set of RM organization structures reflects different stages of development and responsibility. When first established, an RM usually serves as a liaison office and primarily assumes facilitating functions. Accordingly, it is staffed with one headquarters-based staff (the resident representative); two locally recruited national officers, one handling finance and administration and the other project/ programming work; and a number of administrative supporting staff. The Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz, and Uzbekistan RMs are currently organized in this manner. After gaining operating experience, an RM also assumes responsibility for administering a limited number of delegated projects. This usually involves the transfer of three to five projects to an RM. To supervise these projects, the RM is provided with four additional project administration staff: one headquarters-based staff and three locally recruited staff consisting of a national officer, technical assistant, and secretary. The Sri Lanka RM¹⁰ and Viet Nam RM are currently organized in this manner. Increasingly, these RMs have also begun to take on an expanded range of functions such as aid coordination.

The next phase in the RM’s staffing structure is less well defined and has been dictated, in part, by country considerations, including portfolio size and mix, implementation considerations, and the availability of the required quantity and quality of local staff. The older RMs—in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Pacific—are in this category. These RMs administer more delegated projects. Many of them have taken on increased responsibility for a wider range of activities, such as policy dialogue, economic and sector work, and more proactive support of project processing. Some have also taken on expanded project administration functions, for example, reviewing contract awards and partially processing withdrawal applications for disbursement. Other RMs actively promote ADB’s private sector operations. Depending upon their mix of activities, the older RMs have 3–6 headquarters-based staff, 4–9 national officers, and 8–23 supporting staff. Appendix 1 presents RM staff size in 1999. ADB has a relatively low proportion of its staff in RMs: 9 percent of total staff and 5 percent of professional staff. In comparison, other multilateral development banks have a considerably higher proportion of field staff. As of December 1998, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) had approximately 21 and 27 percent of their total staff, and 15 and 14 percent of their professional staff in field offices. The World Bank currently has approximately 40 percent of its regional¹¹ staff and 10 percent of its regional professional staff working in its country offices. The International Finance Corporation is also consolidating its country-based activities with those of the World Bank.

A review of RM expenses over the last 18 years (Appendix 2) shows that ADB expanded its local presence without significantly increasing the RM share (in percentage terms) of the internal administrative expenditure budget. While total RM expenses have increased annually in absolute terms, they appear to have stabilized at around 6 percent of ADB's overall internal administrative expenditure budget.

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