of their tenure or more has been in the same organization. These figures are highly consistent with the discussion based on the organization surveys, with a long predicted tenure within service. It is reassuring that the organization-level surveys are compatible with the individual-level surveys, as we would expect if both survey processes were performed effectively.

# **The Quality of Management**

A final area that can be explored in the organization-level surveys is that of management quality. We have already seen above stark differences in how intensively civil servants in Nigeria are managed relative to their Ethiopian counterparts in terms of the number of managers per non-manager. But what is the quality of that management? So far the discussion has focussed on the physical and human capital of the service. A recent literature (Bloom and Van Reenen, 2007, 2010) has argued for the importance of management as an input to the organizational production function. Bloom and Van Reenen’s ‘World Management Survey’ (WMS) is a tool that aims to measure the quality of organizational management that has now been implemented in dozens of countries around the world.<sup>16</sup> The tool conceptualises good management as regular monitoring and communication of organization goals and activities, efficient personnel and policy management, and the judicious use of incentives. Though there is debate as to how to optimally manage public sector organizations, we utilise the WMS as a descriptive tool here.

In Nigeria, the organization questionnaire included a version of the WMS that was consistent with the practices of the Nigerian public sector. Following the practice of the WMS, each question was converted to a z-score defined across all of the Nigerian organizations. These scores were then aggregated into a single index. Table 3 provides the WMS index score for each of Nigeria’s tiers of government. It shows significant differences in the WMS management index across the three tiers with the difference between the federal government and the other tiers significant at below the 1% level and the difference between the state and local government tiers significant at the 3% level. Federal organizations turn out to be better managed according to the WMS criteria, with state governments the worse managed. Thus, state-level officials face the most intense management and the worse quality (as judged by the WMS); features which could be linked.

We can also follow the WMS methodology of defining sub-indices of management that relate to operations, monitoring, targets and incentives. The operations index traditionally aims to proxy the degree to which organizations are using frontier production processes. Our operations index differs slightly from that of the standard WMS as it includes indicators of the quality of facilities (which we saw above varied significantly in our context) and the degree to which there is a public service culture at the organization. The other indices follow the standard WMS interpretation and respectively outline the extent to which officials and outputs are monitored, the extent and quality of targets, and the degree to which performance incentives are used to motivate employees. Table 3 indicates that along each of these margins we see the same pattern as displayed by the aggregate index, with the best overall management at the federal tier, with the worst management at the state tier. Thus, if you believe any of the WMS sub-indices are correlated with good management practice in the public sector, they exhibit similar differences across tiers of government.

The standard deviations of these averages are large relative to the levels. We can therefore turn to Figure 1, which plots the individual management scores for each of the 94 organizations in the Nigeria data. The scores are highly diverse within tier. The state governments, marked by the diamonds, have a tail of very poorly managed organizations according to the WMS criteria. However, they also have organizations

> 16For details of the questionnaire and methodology of the World Management Survey, see http://www.worldmanagementsurvey.org or Lemos and Scur (2016).

16