in their organization is meritocratic. The organizations are then ranked on this measure within country to facilitate comparison. Ghanaian officials are generally more positive about the quality of their recruitment process, but there is substantial overlap with organizations in Indonesia, and officials at one organization in Ghana are more pessimistic about recruitment being merit-based than civil servants in Pakistan. The officials in Pakistan all come from the same organization, the Federal Board of Revenue, which may explain the relatively homogenous responses across the four regional offices. The Federal Board of Revenue is likely to use the same personnel practices across its regions. Though Ghana has the highest variation, the proportion of civil servants in Indonesia’s offices believing their colleagues are meritocratically recruited goes from 0.6 to almost 1. This could be indicative of substantial differences in the culture and quality of human capital across Indonesia’s government.

Once an officer has been selected for the civil service, they must be allocated a job, and potentially a series of jobs as they move through the service. In every country for which we have data on job allocation, a smaller proportion of officials believe that jobs are allocated based on merit compared with service selection. Far fewer officials believe that jobs are allocated through merit once you are in the service than believe entry to the service is merit-based. In Ghana and Indonesia, the differences are substantial. Understanding the dynamics of internal labor markets within the public service would therefore seem as high a priority, if not higher, than understanding service selection. Getting the right people into the right job requires that they are posted there, not just that they are in service.

In almost all cases, officials entered the service when they were in their mid-twenties, worked for a couple of years before joining their current organization and then stayed there for a decade or more.<sup>19</sup> In Indonesia, the average bureaucrat spends 95% of her time in the service at the organization at which they are surveyed. Such long tenures within the service, and within organization, implies that improving the capacity of public officials is as much about making more effective the existing body of staff as recruiting new bureaucrats (as focused on in Dal Bo, Finan and Rossi (2013) for example), if not more. Similarly, the fact that public sector managers are not using rotation across organizations in the services we study, shown to be a potentially effective incentive by Banerjee et al (2016), implies constraints to using this phenomenon broadly.

These findings are consistent with substantial protections to civil servants being fired or moved out of the service. It would be interesting to better understand three features of these dynamics. One, why is there an initial period of ‘sorting’ in the public sector and does it achieve its aims? Two, why is the average number of years at the current organization such a high proportion of total time in service? Are public officials satisfied with this equilibrium, or would they like to move more? If so, what is stopping them from doing so? Finally, how does the long joint tenure in office impact on the nature of relationships and therefore incentives in the service?

The surveys can shed some initial light on these questions. In Nigeria, only a quarter of officials are satisfied with the number of transfers they have had, and almost half want to be transferred more. So there is demand for greater transfers in Nigeria. As a basic framework for understanding transfers in the civil service, Iyer and Mani (2012) provide evidence that transfers in the Indian civil service arise from political interference in the bureaucracy. They show that politicians construct a network of bureaucrats that they favour and move these to where they can be most useful. They also show that higher skilled individuals are less affected by this interference. We can follow this logic in the Nigeria data

> 19As noted in section 3, there seems to be evidence that a small minority of civil servants transfer more frequently. In Nigeria, almost 80% of staff had moved once in the service when interviewed. However, 8% of staff had moved 4 or more times. Surprisingly, in the Philippines sample, the proportion of officials who have worked in 4 or more departments is also 8%. Corresponding data was not available for the other countries we study. Understanding the characteristics and motivations of these high-mobility civil servants would be interesting, particularly if they are strategically important determinants of organizational productivity.

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