Bank. The GAC surveys were initiated by the Bank to collect a uniform set of questions on governance across multiple countries. Though they were said to be ‘country-specific’, the final questionnaires are relatively standardised (see the example in the online appendix). This set of surveys were some of the World Bank’s first forays into surveying civil servants, along with the Public Officials’ Surveys.<sup>7</sup> The GAC surveys therefore present the World Bank’s view at the start of the 21st century on the most important topics in governance. They emphasize corruption and mechanisms to reduce it, the private sector and its relationship with government, and the role of the citizen in restraining government.

The Ghanaian GAC survey has the lowest average number of interviews per organization (12) of all those we use. The ambition of the GAC researchers was to maximise the number of organizations included in the study at the cost of sample size within each organization. This reflected their interest in gaining a broad picture of government and its relationship to citizens and the private sector. The sample of organizations at which civil servants were interviewed is therefore a combination of central ministries, departments and agencies (631 officers), public service institutions (329) and quasi-government organizations (94). While these organizations are a broader mix of centralized institutions than in the other surveys, the officials they interviewed are all administrative staff and managers from technical cadres involved in the management of public policy.

The survey in Indonesia was implemented by World Bank researchers but originated from a request by government. The Government of Indonesia was keen to understand the impacts of their Bureaucracy Reform Initiative and therefore approached the Bank to support the survey process. The survey is therefore tailored to evaluating reforms after they had been enacted, asking civil servants their perceptions about the impact of the reforms, and how their work processes are now different. The Indonesia survey visited 14 government organizations at the center of government, including the Directorate Generals of Tax and Treasury, the Ministries of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reforms, Agriculture, and Education and Culture, the National Development and Planning Agency and the National Statistics Agency. All officers interviewed are from Indonesian service grades IVa, IIIa and IIId, which are similar in nature to the grade levels in the other surveys.

The same request arose from the Government of the Philippines, who were also keen to better understand the impacts of their own reform process. There are similarities between the Indonesia and Philippines surveys, partly driven by the overlap in research team but also due to the commonality of research focus. In the Philippines, the focus of the government was on those organizations that were thought to be of strategic economic importance: the Bureaus of Internal Revenue and Treasury and the Departments of Budget and Management, Finance, Trade and Industry, Labor and Employment, and Environment and Natural Resources. All officials are professional managers of public policy, at a Philippine service grade above 11. Thus, the surveys in Indonesia and the Philippines can be seen as reporting on civil servants at the very heart of central government.

In all of the surveys mentioned so far, survey enumeration was done through a combination of face-toface interviews and classroom style written responses. The physical presence of enumerators in both cases was an important component of the high response rates of the order of 95% or above (see response rates in Table 1). The public sector setting in the developing world is one in which personal interaction facilitates successful action. In one survey that we include here, surveys were mainly enumerated through e-mail and by the dropping and picking up of surveys, with only a few classroom sessions. As can be seen from the response rate for the Pakistan survey, 37%, the lack of personal enumeration has affected the response rate significantly.

> 7More information about the GAC and Public Officials’ Surveys can be found at http://go.worldbank.org/QFWZEIB1C0 and in Manning, Mukherjee and Gokcekus (2000) respectively. A wider discussion of the Bank’s governance diagnostic tools fielded at the start of the century can be found in Recanatini (2003).

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