posts that are at risk, to target further analysis and remedies more effectively, and subsequently to monitor the impacts of these remedies. Yet governments often do not collect these detailed statistics, or do not record and report them in an accessible and usable format. In Lao PDR, information on absences and applicants may be held at the unit level, but is not reported to the central body responsible for administrative reform. Armenia’s Civil Service Council holds service-wide data on turnover by reason but a breakdown by profession or entity was not easily available. As a practical matter, pay analyses can highlight the need for and the feasibility of implementing such tracking systems.<sup>17</sup> A crucial aspect of tailoring analysis of civil service pay and employment to context is careful understanding of the broader labor market. Lao PDR’s economy is primarily agrarian, and formal salaried jobs are currently a small fraction of total employment. Although the private sector is evolving rapidly, the fact remains that “white collar” (office) alternatives to civil service employment are presently limited and likely to differ substantially by age cohort (with private employers favoring younger workers).

A meaningful analysis of earnings must cover all the different components of formal compensation and, as much as possible, quantify their contribution to the total. In most developing countries, formal civil service remuneration comprises a number of components such as: base salary, monetary or in-kind allowances (paid regularly and generally constant across pay periods), ad hoc payments such as annual bonuses, benefits such as pensions or health insurance, and other kinds of perquisites. Pay analysis rests largely on institutional sources, since it is primarily an analysis of formal job-related compensation; in other words, it excludes secondary income or rent-seeking. Base salary regulations are usually readily available—but focusing narrowly on base salary rarely yields a credible analysis of compensation. In practice, information on earnings should be gathered from central authorities as well as directly from a sample of individual ministries or other units that employ and manage civil servants. In addition to a review of framework regulations (and entity-specific regulations, as necessary), two crucial information sources are payroll data and personnel department managers in line agencies.

Payroll data can often be obtained with surprising ease. In some cases (as in Lao PDR and Mongolia) this may require developing relationships with a set of ministries or other employing units, whereas elsewhere a single institution may aggregate data from individual ministries for the government’s own policy research (for example, Armenia’s National Institute for Labor and Social Research conducts public and private earnings surveys and kindly shared data with the World Bank). Either way, it is essential to look at payroll data across a wide swath of the civil service, since some types of entities benefit from special compensation arrangements, whether funded from the budget, own-source revenues, or donors (as is often the case of the health sector).

Interviews with personnel department managers, in turn, provide a reality check on such data sources, as well as an opportunity to fill in information gaps. Pay data might exclude in-kind allowances or benefits that can be an important source of income. One might expect this information to emerge from a review of framework regulations—but in Lao PDR and Mongolia the existence of important in-kind benefits became evident only from interviews with line managers, who also shared copies of the regulations. With persistence and triangulation of data sources, information barriers can be largely surmounted, even in acutely data scarce environments. Box 1 demonstrates this, detailing the process involved in conducting a micro analysis of civil service earnings in Lao PDR.

17 The Human Resource Management Actionable Governance Indicators framework provides numerous concrete examples of such data that are worth tracking.

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