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# Enmloyment Reforms

The use of salary restraint to control the size of the global wage bill evades the question of the number of civil servants. Sometimes this number is so large that even freezing wages does little to reduce expenditure. Though wage freezes may be politically difficult for governments to impose, they nonetheless appear to be more palatable than reducing overall public sector employment itself. Hence (as discussed earlier in this paper), most regimes prefer to expand employment at diminishing wage levels.

Nonetheless, employment was frozen or even reduced in some cases examined. Four countries froze employment, and in the case of 5 more the Bank urged overall employment reductions. Ten countries actually succeeded in cutting employment either through Bank programs or on their own. Employment reform methods can be located along a continuum of political difficulty. At the low difficulty end of this continuum is one of the first actions usually taken, the elimination of ghosts. This is generally accomplished through the execution of a civil service census and the computerization, mechanization, and reconciliation of personnel management records with those of the payroll (usually situated in the Ministry of Finance). The effort to eliminate ghosts was an important part of operations in 3 countries. Another measure incurring only moderate political cost is the elimination of officially sanctioned posts wihich are not currently filled. (This occurred in the Gambia). Next, temporary workers (to whom the government usually has fewer legal severance obligations) may be retrenched, as occurred in the CAR and Jamaica for example. Several countries have enforced automatic retirement for those reaching retirement age or the requisite years of service. This policy, however, has not been without problems. In Senegal, for example, where official retirement came between ages 55 and 58 or 30 years of service, many employees retained their positions by falsifying records to conceal their true age. The degree to which such automatic retirement policies have a meaningful effect depends, too, on the overall age structure of the civil service and on the pension costs generated by automatic retirement programs. (In most African countries, the age distribution is skewed toward those under 40 years of age.) A freeze on recruitment is often the next step. Six countries imposed recruitment freezes. In the CAR, recruitment was first limited by a rule permitting the hiring of one functionary for every three dismissed. This proved expensive, though, because it became commonplace to recruit a higher level staff whenever three lower level ones were fired. The system was subsequently modified to limit recruitment to a ratio of one franc of hiring for every three francs of savings.

Another method of freezing recruitment is to prevent the guaranteed entry of recent university or public administration school graduates to the civil service. In some cases, entrance into the university itself was blocked. Such steps were taken by the government of the CAR through its adjustment program, but students and recent graduates proved a powerful political force. Although guaranteed access to government was abolished, many students entered government service as