Egypt moved up 20 ranks in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), according to Minister of Planning Ashraf El-Araby. Egypt ranked 94th in this year's report, which was released on 3 December, compared to the 114th place last year. "This confirms that Egypt is on the right track and will have significant positive impacts on the Egyptian economy, while increasing investor confidence and supporting the confidence of international and foreign institutions in the Egyptian economy," El-Araby said. One Wednesday, El-Araby inaugurated the Egyptian Quality Day Conference, in collaboration with the World Bank and the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA). Egypt is working to establish an administrative body consistent with global efficiency systems, according to El-Araby. "There is importance to the terms of the Public Service Law which is set to be implemented by a presidential decree before the upcoming parliamentary elections," he added. The law is aimed at improving the efficiency and quality of state services and employees and will include ten levels of functional arrangements instead of three under the current law, according to the minister. The new law connects an employee's performance to career promotion and evaluation, guaranteeing that an employee is promoted every three years if he or she receives good evaluations. This system will enable hardworking and productive employees to be promoted to leadership positions quickly based on positive evaluation. The new law will remove the idea of an employee receiving "excellent" in evaluations if citizens continuously complain about services and view them as unacceptable according to El-Araby. In addition to enacting reforms that affect the administrative body of the state, the government is also undertaking legislative reforms and settling with investors, the minister said. "Egypt is going through the most difficult period in its history, and we hope to overcome this stage," he said. El-Araby called on all to maximise the quality of services provided to those interactive with state administrative agencies. Head of the Egyptian Center for Integrity and Transparency Shehata Mohamed Shehata said Egypt's ranking improvement can be attributed to its issuing a law against conflicts of interest and a code of conduct for administrative employees. El-Araby said that it did not make sense for all state administrative employees to receive high evaluations, especially with regard to efficiency, while citizens continuously complain about their dealings with state agencies. Senior World Bank researcher Edward Al-Dahdah said: "Comfortable living conditions and the level of progress is very much linked to the quality of public administration, as in the case for countries that are in Western Europe, for example." Al-Dahdah said that the idea of quality must take root in society. And on the subject of the IMF mission that visited Egypt last month, the minister said: "We are very optimistic about the soon to be released report by the IMF on the Egyptian economy during January 2015." "The IMF report on the Egyptian economy will help Egypt very much in terms of preparation and marketing for the economic summit scheduled to be held in March next year," El-Araby said.
