Such reforms are well within the objectives expressed in the government’s draft Civil Service Management Strategy in the context of the key pillars of human resource policies and planning, salary reform, and enhanced performance management. If these and supporting steps can be successfully implemented over the period 2010-2020, the Lao civil service will continue to move toward increasing professionalization and enhanced administrative performance in support of the country’s wider developmental goals.

# **_A Postscript: What Happened Next and What We Could Have Done Differently_**

The foregoing analysis of the Lao PDR civil service pay and compensation practices was conducted in 2010. Here, in the spirit of knowledge building, we provide a brief postscript on the developments in civil service pay and compensation in the three intervening years since the analytical work was carried out and shared with the Lao government.<sup>30</sup> The analysis was received by government with interest and some initial enthusiasm for follow-up technical assistance from the World Bank on pay and HRM reform. As intended, the detailed empirical work served as the basis for evidence-based discussions with the GOL. Surprisingly, the government was uneasy with the conclusion that civil servants in Lao PDR were essentially adequately compensated. This conclusion appears to have run counter to the leadership’s perceptions and perhaps even to a strong but unsubstantiated desire to increase civil service earnings. The GOL was, however, interested in the recommendations for further analysis and on targeted reforms to the compensation and HRM systems. In particular, the GOL sought further analytical assistance from the World Bank in understanding how regional peers and other comparator countries had defined and implemented their own pay and HRM reforms.<sup>31</sup> With this in mind, a description of two to three potential reform sequences on the basis of actual country experiences would have been an invaluable addition to the report’s recommendations.

A structural change in the GOL’s civil service management organization took place in 2011-2012 when our core counterpart, the ministerial-level Public Administration and Civil Service Authority (PACSA) was transformed into an actual ministry, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA). MOHA is a relatively large agency, with broader scope and responsibilities than PACSA, as well as a considerable gain in stature. This could have built momentum for a wide-ranging reform to civil service pay and HRM practices. In practice, however, MOHA has acted cautiously on these contentious issues. It has instead been focused on implementing another GOL priority—a strategy of governance devolution through the province-district-village organization of the Lao PDR. Civil service reforms have essentially been placed on the back-burner on MOHA’s agenda.

Subsequently, contrary to the analysis and recommendations in the _Lao Civil Service Pay and Compensation Review_ , the GOL announced increases in the wage multiplier—and hence increases in base pay across the civil service—over the course of FY12-FY15. The initial increase to the wage multiplier was over 15 percent in FY12 and projected to climb over 30 percent in each of the following three fiscal years, FY13-FY15. From FY11 to FY15, therefore, the wage index was projected to triple, our analysis 30 We are grateful to Harry Garnett for this suggestion and to our colleagues Saysanith Vongviengkham and Willy McCourt for graciously discussing these updates with us and making this brief section possible.

31 The World Bank did subsequently convene a peer-to-peer workshop with representatives of regional comparators presenting their own reform experiences; this was very well received by the Lao government.

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