Building State Capacity in the Caribbean: The State of the Civil Service in Trinidad and Tobago

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Author
Underwood, John
Date
Nov 2018
The potential of public policies and the services provided by any State are closely linked to the quality of its civil service. The ways in which the civil service is managed—in other words, the human resource planning policies, recruitment and selection, professional development, and the incentives for professionalization, among other factors—are critical conditioning factors when it comes to attracting, retaining, and motivating suitable staff to carry out these tasks. This report presents the main findings of Trinidad and Tobago's civil service diagnostic carried out in early 2018. It evaluates the efficacy of the human resource management (HRM) systems in the civil service. The analysis takes as reference the methodology used by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Latin American countries (Longo and Iacoviello, 2010) and the Charter for Caribbean Public Services led by the Caribbean Centre for Development Administration (CARICAD). This is the first evaluation for the country, and it contributed as an input to the series “Building State Capacity in the Caribbean: A Baseline Report of the Civil Service.”