features are defining elements of a civil servant’s work day, determining the resources she has to spend, or perhaps is mandated to spend, as well as the environment in which she must spend it.

Table 2 provides a broad description of the countries we study and the variation between them. They primarily employ presidential systems of governance that are regarded as democracies. The Polity IV Score, an aggregated index of positive indicators of democracy and negative indicators of autocracy ranging from +10 (which implies strongly democratic) to -10 (which implies strongly autocratic), for all but one of the countries is 7 or above. Only Ethiopia has a negative Polity IV score.

Within each of these political entities is a state bureaucracy. A common indicator of the scale of a public sector bureaucracy is the proportion of total employment made up by the state. As Table 2 reports, in most of the countries we study, this proportion is below 10%. However, in Ethiopia the public sector is far larger, at 22% of total employment. Related to this is the fraction of government expenditure spent on civil servant and public sector wages. Table 2 shows how weakly public employment and wage bill figures are correlated, with the caveats on the reliability of government budget figures outlined in Baddock, Lang and Srivastava (2016). Ghana spends 36% of its government expenditures on wages, but with only 5% of employment in the public sector. Pakistan’s wage bill, on the other hand, is only 4% of total expenditures, while public employment is 7% of total employment.

Within this wage envelope, civil servants get paid differentially depending on their position in the hierarchy and their sector. The extent of such wage inequality varies across countries, and is represented by the ‘compression ratio’. Table 2 reports a compression ratio that is the ratio of the average total compensation of a senior official (a judge) versus that of a junior official (a secretary). In Indonesia, the compression ration is 1.4, indicating relatively limited dispersion in the Indonesian civil service relative to that of the Philippines, with a compression ration of 3.7.<sup>8</sup> While there is likely to be a degree of misreporting here, existing evidence indicates that compression ratios are highly variable across countries.

Previous efforts at assessing the quality of these bureaucracies are also summarised in Table 2. Rauch and Evans (1999) used expert surveys to assess a sub-sample of the countries we study. They defined a ‘Weberianness’ index that aggregated questions on the degree to which core state agencies are characterized by meritocratic recruitment and offer predictable, rewarding long-term careers. Close to the bottom of their index (which scored countries from 1 to 13.5) was Nigeria, with a score of 3. Close to the top was Pakistan, with a score of 11.

Pakistan’s success in the Rauch and Evans index did not carry through to the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) created by Kaufmann, Kraay and Mastruzzi (2010). Again using expert surveys, the WGI’s ‘Government Effectiveness Score’ presents a percentile ranking of countries on an aggregate measure of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies. Ghana, Indonesia and the Philippines score substantially higher than Ethiopia, Nigeria and Pakistan, indicating that the former are perceived as significantly more capable civil services.

Another area of bureaucratic quality that has been subject to international measurement and comparison is the area of corruption. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index includes a measure of the perceptions of corruption among ‘public officials/civil servants’. The figures in Table 2 describe the proportion of respondents that believe public officials/civil servants are corrupt or extremely corrupt. The correlation between ‘government effectiveness’ and ‘corruption’ in this country-level data is low, with

> 8International data on pay in the public sector are typically based on assessments by government-agencies that are skewed towards base pay net of allowances. Allowances can be a significant component of gross enumeration in the developing world’s public sectors.

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