Why we need a better understanding of government's people machine
Article highlights
Government typically employ 15 to 30% of all workers in developing countries
Share articleOur understanding of the personnel dimension of government bureaucracies is patchy at best
Share articleA deeper understanding of govt personnel will help strengthen state capacity
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Government bureaucracies typically employ 15 to 30% of all workers, and 50 to 60% of formal sector or salaried workers in developing countries. This fact alone warrants a detailed understanding of the functioning of public sector labour markets and their influence on the broader labour market, particularly as the characteristics of public sector workers - their gender, age, and skills profiles, for instance - can be quite different from their private sector counterparts.
But more importantly, the motivation of government workers and thereby the productivity of government bureaucracies impacts almost everything else in an economy, from business regulations, to infrastructure provision, to the delivery of services.
Research results
Unfortunately, our understanding of the personnel dimension of government bureaucracies is patchy at best, despite bureaucracy being a rich field of academic and policy research. Until recently, though, this was a largely qualitative pursuit, focusing more on de jure analysis of civil service laws and regulations, and case studies, and laced with a strong normative tone of how bureaucracies should look (i.e. “like Denmark”) and emphasising “form” over “function”.
Empirical studies such as Rauch and Evans (2000) used surveys to measure aspects of government bureaucracies. They found a cross-national association between the core characteristics of “Weberian bureaucracies” - meritocratic recruitment and insulation from political interference - and good governance to be an exception. But the field is evolving rapidly, with an array of recent rigorous observational and experimental studies on public service motivation, recruitment, monitoring, performance incentives, and management.
So, what do we know so far about the internal workings of government?
To start with, it is clear that public sectors tend to attract individuals that have higher levels of social or service motivation. Higher wages can also improve the quality of the applicant pool, but this may come at the expense of attracting less socially motivated individuals. We also know that digitally-enabled monitoring, combined with rewards and sanctions, reduces service provider absenteeism (references), and that digital registration and payment systems reduce pilferage of funds for welfare beneficiaries.
In addition, research has established that performance bonuses can be a powerful incentive for improving worker effort and outcomes in jobs where measuring effort and outcomes is relatively easier, such as revenue collection and teaching. Targets, too, are crucial. Better managed schools and hospitals - those that systematically set targets and monitor progress against those targets, and which reward high performing staff - have higher student learning outcomes and lower in-hospital mortality rates.
It is also clear that there is considerable heterogeneity in the quality of management across ministries and localities within government, pointing to the potential of targeted reform initiatives even in weak governance settings. Politicians often frequently transfer senior bureaucrats -- in India there is a 53% probability that a senior official will be transferred in a given year, which increases by another 10 percentage points when there is change in administration - and, as a result, junior-level bureaucrats under-invest in the acquisition of skills.
Next steps
This is all valuable knowledge, and furthermore we believe that the study of government bureaucracy is poised for the kind of “takeoff” that the study of the firm as an organisation witnessed in the 1980s.
Nonetheless, there are some significant hurdles that need to be overcome if this is to happen. One is the lack of data. Many governments do not collect good information on the personnel they employ and if they do they are averse to sharing it with the public, despite the fact that public taxes pay for these employees. Another is that it is hard to do experiments for most core government functions unless there is a phased roll-out of a particular initiative that enables randomisation, which is rare.
Getting this data systematically across a range of countries will require partnerships with governments for which the World Bank is uniquely positioned.
My colleagues and I at the Word Bank's Governance Global Practice and Development Economics Research Group recently began an initiative called the Bureaucracy Lab which will gather administrative data, conduct surveys of government bureaucrats, and conduct field experiments of various public sector reform initiatives. A better understanding of the personnel employed in government - their numbers, gender, age, academic qualifications, earnings, and the occupations - is the bare minimum for analysing state capacity and its impact on a variety of development outcomes.
Surveys of government workers can complement these descriptive statistics by offering insights on a variety of human resource and management practices; for example, a recent survey in the Philippines found that teachers were largely motivated by mission while administrative workers were largely motivated by job security.
Opening up the “black box” of the internal workings of the government bureaucracy is critical for understanding the determinants of state capacity. Our work is just beginning and it promises to be a challenging and exciting journey.
This article was first published on the Governance for Development Blog
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