# **Section 1: Introduction**

Civil service recruitment is an essential though often neglected component of governance. The literature on good governance has focused on installing institutions of accountability for the state (World Bank, 2004); however, decisions regarding public sector hiring represent a basis for the overall governance environment, for several reasons. First, recruitment practices determine the qualifications of public employees. Public employees should meet a minimum education standard, as well as possess a particular type of education when the job is specialized. Second, civil servant recruitment decisions define the quantity of hiring, which then establishes the level of spending on salaries in relation to other expenditures. If high levels of recruitment take place with little respect for budgetary limits, then this will tend to crowd out the additional forms of spending. Third, recruitment practices include the decision of the particular jobs to be created, which relate to the proper distribution of skills within the public sector.

The focus of this paper is on the public sector recruitment practices of the Union of Comoros, a small, fragile, decentralized African state. The paper particularly seeks to explain the amount of recruitment and the respect for educational standards in the civil service of Comoros in recent years. Much of the literature on the civil service in the developing world has focused on the difficulty in successfully reforming the public sector, and particularly recruitment practices (Robinson, 2006; Polidano, 2001; Public Sector Board, 2000; Independent Evaluation Group, 2008). It is unclear precisely what formal or informal systems – including strong interests – surround recruitment practices, but these reports strongly suggest that such systems determine the likelihood of sustained and successful reform efforts (Reid, undated; Shepherd, 2003).

The paper proceeds as follows. After describing the case of Comoros and the research methodology and design, it presents an analysis of a database of over 11,000 civil servants, correlating spikes of recruitment with different events and also showing that recruitment generally respects the minimal standards. The second part of the analysis focuses on systematically targeted qualitative case studies at the community level, pinpointing the way recruitment works on the ground. The third part provides an institutional analysis of the recruitment process, both in terms of the steps of hiring and the fiscal framework that surrounds recruitment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of such research for policy and the literature.

## **Section 2: The case of Comoros**

### **General background to Comoros**

Comoros, with an estimated population of 734,900 people, is a small nation with least developed country status. Made up of three islands, its GDP per capita (PPP) was $1,446 in 2013, while the average growth rate of real GDP per capita over the decade from 2001-2010 was -0.1%. Employment opportunities are limited in Comoros given the structure of its economy. Due to an undeveloped manufacturing base, approximately 80% of the Comorian population is employed in agriculture, which, in 2009, made up 51% of GDP and 90% of exports; this production is almost exclusively comprised of family based agriculture. Comoros is a net importer of not only processed but also primary goods such as food, leading to a consistently large negative balance of payments. A main source of income support for the Comorian population is remittances, primarily from the diaspora in France, whose remittances in 2007 represented an estimated 17% of GDP. In 2003, according the most recent household survey, 45% of the population lived below the poverty line. Human development has not advanced substantially either; the 2014 Comoros HDI ranking was 159 out of 187 countries.

Governance in Comoros is overall weak. Comoros is categorized as a fragile state, due to the lack of government capacity and to the political instability since independence. The 2011 2