Ethiopia the least corrupt but the second least effective. Similarly, Indonesia’s civil service is believed to be both corrupt and effective.

# **The Responsibility of Service**

The breadth of the responsibilities of a civil servant arises from her constitutional mandate to respect and maintain state institutions over time, leaving the service as the residual claimant on all of the polity’s activities that could affect the stability of the state. Unlike almost any other terms of reference, a civil servant’s terms frequently include a provision for ‘any other responsibilities delegated by the civil service hierarchy’. This ensures that when required, a civil servant can undertake activities that were not contractable on her entry to the service but are perceived by the state to be of net social benefit.

Since the state is the residual claimant on all of the polity’s activity, the breadth of a civil servant’s work can be as broad as the citizenry she serves. It is thus useful to understand the scale and geographic spread of the citizens an official serves. Returning to Table 2, we see that the countries for which we have surveys are typically large, both in terms of population size and land area. Senior civil servants in our data must make policy decisions across 100 million people or more, and in Ethiopia and Indonesia across thousands of square kilometers.

In many countries, this issue of scale is partly confronted by creating a federal structure for the state. Partially self-governing units that serve a fraction of the citizenry are argued to be closer to the population they serve. However, even at the state level officials must often serve very large populations. To explore this consideration, we turn to the two surveys that include surveys of state and local government officials: Nigeria and Ethiopia.

In the first row of Table 3, we display the average land area over which bureaucrats at the organizations we study work, and in the second row the average population that they are mandated to serve.<sup>9</sup> On average, local governments in Nigeria are roughly the size of Greater London (1,569 square kilometers). This is therefore one way to appreciate the scale of geography across which officials working for a Nigerian local government must serve citizens. Continuing the analogy, and using statistics for all states, state government officials must serve an area equal to approximately 15 Londons, while Ethiopian regional officials serve citizens across an area equivalent to 56 Londons. Officials working in federal organizations of Nigeria and Ethiopia frequently face policy decisions that will impact citizens across the nation. For example, a director in the Ministry of Water must decide water supply policy that impacts on the nation as a whole, with its myriad water basins and hydrological areas.

Apart from bureaucrats in Nigeria’s Lagos state, the _population_ local government officials must serve in our focus countries is far smaller than London’s. In Nigeria, the average population of a local government is 180,000 and in Ethiopia is 101,000. At the state level in Nigeria officials must serve an average population of 3 million people, and in Ethiopia, given the relatively large size of its regions, officials must serve 8 million people. In the most recent data available before the surveys, federal officials in Nigeria and Ethiopia served populations of 140 million and 74 million respectively; populations which are increasing at some of the highest rates in the world.<sup>10</sup>

> 9To understand the representativeness of this sample of organizations for Nigeria, and for a wider sense of the context, we can compare the figures in Table 3 to the corresponding figures for all states and local governments. The average population being served across all states is 3.78 million, with a corresponding standard deviation of 1.71 million, and across all local governments is 0.18 million with a standard deviation of 0.1 million, coinciding exactly with our sample. The land area covered averaged across all states is 24,635 square kilometers, with a standard deviation of 18,202, and across local governments is 1,177 square kilometers with a standard deviation of 1,405. Thus, the figures provided in Table 3 closely resemble those of Nigeria as a whole.

> 10At the same time these surveys were undertaken, China had 5 regions (provinces) whose populations were greater than

10