access to the internet is a little more bimodal, with half the orgaisations having zero access and the other three having at least 15 hours a day. Each of these statistics echoes the high degree of heterogeneity in facilities across local governments, even within a single state covering an area of 46,000 square kilometers.

There is long debate on whether public sector organizations like these would be more productive with greater resources. A common refrain from public officials is that resources of all types (their salaries, funds for projects they are working on and information technology to help them spend those funds well) are insufficient, uncertain, and released late. As discussed in the World Development Report (2016), rigorous evidence on the impacts of information technology on public administration across government in the developing world - such as a ‘one laptop per bureaucrat’ initiative - would be useful in influencing this debate.<sup>12</sup>

# **Colleagues**

Who does the civil servant see as they walk into the office each day? We saw in Table 2 how the proportion of the population employed by the public sector varies considerably across countries. However, to understand the physical environment of the bureaucracy, we require numbers on the number of officials a bureaucrat works with in the same office. Table 3 provides estimates of the number of officials in each of the organizations we study for which we have organizational data (Nigeria and Ethiopia). These figures aim to reflect the number of officials who work in the same office or compound, and thus are in some sense ‘colleagues’. They do not include traditional service providers such as nurses or teachers working in external facilities, whose numbers can be extremely large. For example, at the regional level in Ethiopia, including service providers in the education sector would increase average staff numbers by roughly 20,000 per organization.

The staff numbers vary significantly across tiers of government. At the federal level, the other members of your organization number in the thousands, with divisions and sub-divisions of officials in the same organization that have no interaction in their daily work. The experience of being a federal civil servant is, on this margin at least, the closest to the stereotype of the army of bureaucrats working as a tiny cog in a giant organization. Returning to the CSAE manufacturing firms data, not even firms at the 95th percentile have employees on the scale of an average federal ministry. Rather, working for a federal organization implies that a bureaucrat is working for one of the largest organizations in the country.

The numbers shrink at the state and local levels. These organizations are still relatively large employers, averaging an employment rate akin to manufacturing firms in the 80th percentile. However, they are more collegial affairs. Here many of the organizations in the data are of the order of a hundred employees or so. It would likely be easier for a civil servant at the local government level to interact with most of her colleagues with some regularity.

It is informative to look at the number of citizens per civil servant at the local level, which is 279 in Nigeria and 716 in Ethiopia. Local government officials are often seen as a liaison between citizens and the government. While the citizen’s first port of call may be a village or ward official, local government officers are often seen as technical experts in the area for a particular sector, or have the capacity to negotiate for resources from their chief executive officer. Their ability to provide these services across the population they are intended to serve will partly be a function of how many of their colleagues there are to share the burden of work. It would seem that, at least in terms of manpower, an Ethiopian local bureaucrat has substantially less support from his colleagues.

> 12Existing evidence, such as Lewis-Faupel et al (2016), indicates that improving information technology infrastructure in developing country governments can have positive effects on the quality of service delivery.

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