would then probe respondents’ responses and ask for examples, and then score responses on a continuous 1-5 scale, where for indication the scoring grid described a score of one as corresponding to circumstances where, “The division uses the same procedures no matter what. In the face of specific needs or community/ client peculiarities, it does not try to develop a ‘better fit’ but automatically uses the default procedures.”; a score of three corresponded to, “The division makes steps towards responding to specific needs and peculiarities, but stumbles if the specific needs are complex. Often, tailoring of services is often unsuccessful.”; and a score of five corresponded to, “The division always redefines its procedures to respond to the needs of communities/ clients. It does its best to serve each individual need as best as it can.” We elicited information on management practices in _individual_ surveys administered to bureaucrats. The surveys enumerated both those in managerial roles, as well as bureaucrats being managed by seniors. In contrast to much of the earlier work on management, we can therefore reconstruct management practices based on alternative sets of respondents in the organization. The measure of Ghanaian management practices we use for our core analysis averages management scores over the most senior divisional-bureaucrat reports. The median (mean) number of senior managers per organization is 13 (20). This retains the closest similarity to the way in which management practices were elicited in RR. However, we later show robustness to alternative constructs for management practices in organizations, based on all senior bureaucrats in an organization (a top-down view of management), or as elicited from lower-tier bureaucrats being managed (a bottom-up view of management).

The answers to questions on roles and flexibility are then combined to produce a measure of management practices related to autonomy, denoted CS-autonomy. Similarly, the answers to questions on incentives and monitoring scores are combined to produce a CS-incentives/monitoring measure of management practices. The answers to questions on staffing and targeting topics are combined into a CS-other measure of management practices. The scores on each practice are converted into normalized z-scores by taking unweighted means of the underlying z-scores (so are continuous variables with mean zero and variance one by construction), where both are increasing in the notion of ‘better management’. For the CS-autonomy index, we assume greater autonomy corresponds to better management, and for the CS-incentives/monitoring measure we also assume the provision of incentives/monitoring corresponds to better management practices (as suggested to be so in private sector settings [Prendergast 1999]).<sup>8</sup> The CS-autonomy and CS-incentives/monitoring management scores are positively correlated ( _⇢_ = _._ 67) suggesting complementarity of these practices, but this did not have to be so. For example, substitution between practices could occur if bureaucrats have career concerns, and so performance incentives are not required once autonomy is provided. Alternatively, if bureaucrats

> 8These z-scores are constructed using data for all 45 organizations we can construct management practices for based on our civil servant survey. To address concerns over sample selection, we later show robustness of our main finding to redefining the z-scores based only on the 30 organizations for which project completion data exists.

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