then the most at the state. The state government is therefore the most ‘managed’ of the three tiers of government.

Conditional on definitional issues, a surprising feature of these statistics is that the span of control in Ethiopia and to some extent the Philippines is an order of magnitude higher than in Ghana and Nigeria. For example, Nigeria has a vastly larger number of managers operating within the service (one for every 1.23 non-managers) than Ethiopia (one for every 13 non-managers). Depending on your taste for management, there is a very clear choice between these two types of civil service, and the experience of the civil servant is likely to be distinct in these environments. This would be true for managers, who would manage a smaller team of civil servants, and non-managers, who would likely have a higher number of managers above them.

UNDP (2014) reports that across the developing world, women are under-represented in senior decisionmaking positions in the public sector. In only 5 out of the 35 developing countries and territories they study do women make up 30% or more of those in decision-making positions. Our focus is on the civil service (and excludes male dominated environments such as the security forces), such that we see a more balanced picture in our data. Table 4 presents the proportion of managers who are female in our surveys, and they are typically only slightly less than the proportion of women in the service as a whole.

# **Tenure in Organization**

How long do these officials stay colleagues? Without access to administrative data over time, to answer this question we can turn to estimates of the staff turnover rate in the organization-level surveys, or the proportion of officials that leave the organization each year. These were calculated based on noncontractor positions that were vacated for any reason, though in the Ethiopia data where the reason was asked, the vast majority of movements were voluntarily instigated by the official. The rates are slightly higher in Ethiopia, and in fact high enough for the Government of Ethiopia to undertake a survey to investigate the phenomenon, allowing us to use it in this paper.

If the rates were applied equally to all civil servants, they would imply a stay of 16 years in an organization for Nigeria and 10 years in Ethiopia. This does not mean that some civil servants do not move much more frequently. In fact, evidence from the Nigerian survey implies that there are some civil servants who move frequently while the main body of staff stay in the same organization for much of their career. Interestingly, this was not due to the formal rotation system in place for some cadres of staff. Many staff within those cadres did not move at all. Rather, it seemed that some civil servants were able to influence their progression through the service, and turnover was fully voluntary. Respondents who listed multiple organizations in their service history were also more likely to state that they had control over their career progression and that they had had ‘influence’ on securing their current posting. The vast majority of others in the Nigeria survey said their posting was random.

Column (1) of Table 3 provides a benchmark figure for each topic based on taking the mean across all tiers in each country where the data is available and then taking the mean of those two figures. For turnover, it is 0.08, implying that the average duration a civil servant in our data stays in her organization is 7 years. Given the evidence from Nigeria about the heterogeneity in transfers among officials, this may be a lower bound for many bureaucrats. Thus, many bureaucrats work together in the same organization for well over a decade.

This approach is supported by asking civil servants about their tenure directly, with the caveat that one cannot interview officials who have left. Table 4 indicates that the officials interviewed had been at their organization for 14 years on average. Since the average number of years in service is 17, three-quarters 15