Organization and Team-Design: Issues for the Development Assessment
Because of the diversity of issues and the multiplicity of topics that need to be considered, staffing of the development component of the assessment needs to be designed with great care.
A first challenge is the choice of sectors and infrastructural aspects to be examined in detail. Here the balance that needs to be struck is between (a) the need to assess performance in relation to services and sectors that are already well established in the country and (b) the exploration of the reasons for gaps and missing markets. For example, an extensive study of securities markets may not be appropriate if only a handful of securities are listed on the stock exchange, yet the scope for improving corporate access to equity may need to be evaluated. Likewise, in many cases, it proves impracticable to carry out full accounting, auditing, or corporate governance assessments in the context of a financial sector review, yet those issues are important for the legal and information infrastructure assessments.
A second challenge is ensuring that the cross-cutting issues are adequately addressed from a developmental perspective. This challenge calls for very clear terms of reference to be given to sectoral assessors. The sectoral assessors will need to generate some of the input for the infrastructural reviews and other cross-cutting aspects (e. g., legal and informational deficiencies, problems with the payments system, specific taxation problems, and so forth). Much can be obtained in this context from the corporate sector assessment (if one is scheduled).
It will normally be advisable to include in the team a lawyer who is specifically charged with assembling and collating the legal infrastructural review of the development assessment. Because there is no agreed-on standard for assessing the legal infrastructure, specific detailed terms of reference for the lawyer’s work need to be elaborated. In addition, it will be important to ensure that the legal infrastructural review remains focused on the development issues, plus supporting the Basel Core Principles (BCP) for effective banking supervision and other aspects of the stability assessment.
