of the surveys asked questions related to the satisfaction of officials along multiple margins, typically their overall satisfaction with their job, and their specific satisfaction with their wage, and with other benefits. Unfortunately, the precise wording of the questions varied across countries.

In Ghana, officials were asked to what extent they agreed with, “Working in the public sector is generally better than working in the private sector”, “My salary is very satisfactory” and “My other benefits (pension, health, etc.) are very satisfactory”. In Indonesia and Pakistan, they were asked, “How do you compare [your organization] as a place to work with private sector firms that are in a similar area as [your organization]?” and the extent to which they agreed that, “Your pay is fair compared to staff doing similar jobs in other [ministries]”. In Nigeria, officials were asked directly whether they were satisfied with their current job, current income and working conditions. In the Philippines, the question was the extent to which they agreed that, “You are satisfied with the pay you receive for your work”.

With overall job satisfaction, we can compare among the Ghana, Indonesia and Pakistan surveys, as these all ask about the experience of working in the public sector _relative_ to the private sector. Looking at the country averages in Table 4, we see relatively substantial differences, with 53% of Ghanaian civil servants neutral or positively satisfied with their jobs relative to the private sector and 85% of Indonesian civil servants. The Nigeria survey, however, asks about their overall satisfaction with their job. Officials may feel that jobs in the private sector are better than those in the public sector, but overall it is better to have a job than not at all. Such a story would be consistent with the fact that Nigeria has the highest overall level of satisfaction (with 89% of civil servants neutral or positively satisfied with their job overall).

Splitting overall satisfaction by gender, we do not see major differences anywhere but in Pakistan. Women in the service there are 7 percentage points more likely to state that they are satisfied with their public sector job relative to the private sector. This may be an artefact of the limited opportunities for women in Pakistan’s private sector (UN, 2016).

We can also look at the distribution of satisfaction within and across government organizations. Figure 3 plots, for each organization in our sample, the proportion of civil servants in that organization that are neutral or positively satisfied with their job. These proportions are plotted against the percentile of average satisfaction at an organization _within country_ . Thus, Figure 3 shows us that officials at the median organization in the Ghanaian data are roughly 40% less satisfied with their jobs than those in the Indonesian data. A similar claim could be made about the comparison between Ghana and Nigeria, but this would be conditional on the wording issues outlined above.

Ghana is a relative outlier in the extent of variation its organizations exhibit in average satisfaction. The other surveys fluctuate between 60% and 100% of staff satisfied with their jobs overall.<sup>24</sup> Interestingly, though the data from Pakistan all come from a single sector (revenue collection), the four organizations on which we have data exhibit a similar magnitude of variation to all the organizations in Nigeria or Indonesia. Sector does not seem to be a substantive predictor of motivation.

Other margins of stratification also struggle to explain much of the variance. There is almost no difference between the satisfaction levels of professional and support staff in Ghana or between males and females there. In Indonesia, a tenth of a standard deviation separates professional and support staff’s average reports of overall satisfaction, while average satisfaction across Nigeria’s tiers of government fluctuates by a few percentage points only. Understanding what drives differences in motivation levels across government, particularly those of the orders of magnitude displayed in the Ghana data, would be an interesting avenue for research.

> 24This variation could be partly explained by the lower sample sizes at each organizations. As described in section 2, the researchers behind the Ghanaian survey gained a broader sample of organizations at the cost of a smaller number of interviews at each.

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