Suchergebnisse

This paper investigates the consequences of granting politicians power over bureaucrats in the implementation of small-scale public infrastructure projects. While potentially bolstering the incentive for the executive to perform, increased legislative oversight may lead to distortions in the technocratic process for political gain. By assembling a nationally representative data set from Nigeria that tracks public projects from inception to audit, the paper finds evidence of a clear trade-off between political oversight and bureaucratic autonomy. Using an instrumental variables strategy in which early career choices of politicians are key determinants of legislative committee membership, the analysis finds that legislative influence increases the likelihood that a project is launched by 18 percent, but at the cost of reducing project quality by 15 percent and increasing the reported misuse of funds. The results highlight the fundamental tension between bureaucratic inaction and political corruption.

Who are the civil servants that serve poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct surveys of civil servants -- the professional body of administrators who manage government policy -- and their organizations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, to highlight key aspects of their characteristics and experience of civil service life. Civil servants in the developing world face myriad challenges to serving the world's poor, from limited facilities to significant political interference in their work. There are a number of commonalities across service environments, and the paper summarizes these in a series of 'stylized facts' of the civil service in the developing world. At the same time, the particular challenges faced by a public official vary substantially across and within countries and regions. For example, measured management practices differ widely across local governments of a single state in Nigeria. Surveys of civil servants allow us to document these differences, build better models of the public sector, and make more informed policy choices.

What determines the distribution of information acquired within the hierarchy of a public organization? Without market processes, the generation and absorption of information in bureaucracy relies on individual actors undertaking costly action to acquire it. This paper reports on comparisons between individual-level claims by public officials in the Government of Ethiopia regarding the characteristics of local constituents they serve and objective benchmark data. Public officials make large errors about their constituents' characteristics. The errors of 49 percent of public officials are at least 50 percent of the underlying benchmark data. Given public officials' stated reliance on this information to make public policy decisions, such mistakes imply a substantial misallocation of public resources. The results are consistent with classic theoretical predictions related to the incentives that determine information acquisition in hierarchies, such as de facto control over decision making and an organizational culture of valuing operational information. A field experiment implies that these incentives mediate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving the information of public-sector agents.

We document the correlation between the workplace diversity in bureaucratic organizations and public service delivery. We do so in the context of Nigeria, where ethnicity is a salient form of self-identity. We thus expand the empirical management literature highlighting beneficial effects of workplace diversity, that has focused on private sector firms operating in high-income settings. Our analysis combines two data sources: (i) a survey to over 4,000 bureaucrats eliciting their ethnic identities; (ii) independent engineering assessments of completion rates for 4,700 public sector projects. The ethnic diversity of bureaucracies matters positively: a one standard deviation increase in the ethnic diversity of bureaucrats corresponds to 9 percent higher completion rates. In line with the management literature from private sector firms in high-income countries, this evidence highlights a potentially positive side of ethnic diversity in public sector organizations, in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa.

AbstractTo what extent do public officials feel they have control over their lives in public service? We develop a new measure of perceived control in the bureaucracy based on the locus of control scale. The "bureaucratic locus of control" (BLOC) scale extends standard measures to a bureaucratic context as well as introduces an extension to these measures that focuses on the power of systemic forces in officials' lives. Field tests among a representative sample of Ethiopian public officials suggest that the BLOC scale has good internal reliability and that it is positively associated with promotion opportunities, rewards and motivation. We showcase its use by investigating the extent to which inequality in control impacts the general perception of control. Potential uses of the scale to study bureaucratic dynamics are discussed.

AbstractWe study the relationship between management practices, organizational performance, and task clarity, using observational data analysis on an original survey of the universe of Ghanaian civil servants across 45 organizations and novel administrative data on over 3,600 tasks they undertake. We first demonstrate that there is a large range of variation across government organizations, both in management quality and in task completion, and show that management quality is positively related to task completion. We then provide evidence that this association varies across dimensions of management practice. In particular, task completion exhibits a positive partial correlation with management practices related to giving staff autonomy and discretion, but a negative partial correlation with practices related to incentives and monitoring. Consistent with theories of task clarity and goal ambiguity, the partial relationship between incentives/monitoring and task completion is less negative when tasks are clearer ex ante and the partial relationship between autonomy/discretion and task completion is more positive when task completion is clearer ex post. Our findings suggest that organizations could benefit from providing their staff with greater autonomy and discretion, especially for types of tasks that are ill-suited to predefined monitoring and incentive regimes.

A burgeoning area of social science research examines how state capabilities and bureaucratic effectiveness shape economic development. This paper studies how the management practices of civil service bureaucrats correlate to the delivery of public projects, using novel data from the Ghanaian Civil Service. This paper combines hand-coded progress reports on 3,600 projects with a management survey in the government ministries and departments responsible for these projects. The analysis finds that management matters: practices related to autonomy are positively associated with project completion, yet practices related to incentives/monitoring of bureaucrats are negatively associated with project completion. The negative impact of incentives/monitoring practices is partly explained by bureaucrats having to multi-task, interactions with their intrinsic motivation, their engagement in influence activities, and project characteristics such as the clarity of targets and deliverable outputs. The paper discusses the interplay between management practices and corruption, alternative methods by which to measure management practices in organizations, and the external validity of the results. The findings suggest that the focus of many civil service reform programs on introducing stronger incentives and monitoring may backfire in some organizations, and that even countries with low levels of state capability may benefit by providing public servants with greater autonomy in some spheres.

AbstractThe public sector employs roughly a third of the world's paid workforce. Their wages not only represent the income of a substantial portion of the population but also influence pay setting across the rest of the economy. However, global data on employment and compensation within the public sector, and how these compare to the private sector, has been limited to date. This paper describes a novel dataset produced by the World Bank's "Bureaucracy Lab" attempting to fill this gap. The "Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators" (WWBI) are compiled from over 53 million unique observations and consist of 63,282 individual observations across 92 variables of the characteristics of public‐sector employment, compensation, and the overall wage bill for 132 countries between 2000 and 2018. The indicators, constructed from nationally representative household surveys, present a micro‐founded picture of public sector labor markets across the world.

AbstractDeveloping nations demand a different scholarly approach in the field of public administration. We advance an agenda for research that stands on four pillars. First, in the absence of easily accessible data scholars of developing world public administration must assemble it for themselves. Second, building and testing theory plays a paramount role because researchers face limited information. Third, in developing countries, multi‐national and non‐governmental organizations are often crucial and must be considered in studying public administration. Fourth, given the novelties and ambiguities researchers face, qualitative information must be integrated throughout the research process. Our article—and the articles in this volume—constitute a call for developing country research to contribute to the study of public administration writ large, informing our understanding of both developing and developed states.