# **5 Discussion**

We discuss three remaining important issues: (i) on the interplay between management practices and corruption in service; (ii) on alternative approaches to measuring management practices; (iii) on the external validity of our findings.

## **5.1 Corruption**

While the recent economics literature has emphasized the importance of the intrinsic motivation of bureaucrats, a long-standing literature in public administration emphasizes that civil servants might pursue their own self-interest [Wilson 1989]. This more negative view of bureaucrats spur us to explore how the correlations between project completion rates and incentives/monitoring are mediated through perceptions of corruption among civil service organizations. Corruption in public bureaucracies is an issue in Ghana, and in other countries at similar stages of development (although as Figure 2 shows, the fact that 34% of projects are fully completed also suggests corruption is not all-pervasive).<sup>20</sup> We use two approaches to elicit information on perceptions of corruption in service. First, we focus on corruption by senior bureaucrats by measuring the proportion of received corruption rents (kickbacks) that are claimed to have gone to seniors in the organization. Second, we build a measure based on bureaucrats’ reports of the proportion of recent projects and/or programs on which officials report observing others engaging in corrupt practices. We then examine whether the partial correlation of management practices related to autonomy and the provision of incentives/monitoring vary with each measure of corruption.<sup>21</sup> Table 9 shows the results: for neither measure of corruption do we find evidence that the provision of autonomy to bureaucrats interacts with corruption to lead to a significantly lower likelihood of project completion. For the second measure, the negative impact of practices related to incentives/monitoring is ameliorated if there is a greater proportion of recent projects on which officials report observing others engaging in corrupt practices. This suggests that the negative consequences of corrupt practices can be partially o↵set by the provision of incentives/monitoring of bureaucrats.

> 20In 2015 Ghana scored at the 53rd percentile worldwide on the World Governance Indicators’s Control of Corruption measure; Nigeria scored at the 13th percentile [World Bank 2018].

> 21The first measure is based on asking what proportion of unofficial payments are shared with the superior in the hypothetical scenario that, ‘Imagine that a corrupt bureaucrat extracts unofficial payments. Typically in your organization, what proportion of the unofficial payments does s/he share with the following types or groups of people.’ An organization-level average from across all interviews is constructed and for our whole sample, the organization-average was 11%, but wide a relatively wide dispersion reflected in a standard deviation of 8%. The second measure used a similar question structure, but asked officials the proportion of projects on which they ‘observed others breaking service rules for their own benefit’. Officials are more likely to report the corrupt behavior of others, and 16% of officials have observed such acts by others in their organization.

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