management in the country. Neighouring civil servants can use distinctive means to further their careers. Reform initiatives might therefore be built such that they can be automatically targeted to local conditions. For example, creating an incentive-compatible menu of options into which organizations self-select (like firms offering a menu of options to consumers) provides the best chance of it being appropriate for the organization’s particular needs.

_FACT THREE_ . **The organization plays a critical role in the experience of the civil servant** . Throughout this paper we have seen examples of where organizations seem to play an important part in determining the experience of the official and her productivity. There are limited transitions of civil servants across organizations, making the organization’s characteristics a key determinant of the civil servant’s working life. Creating mechanisms through which reformers, including civil servants throughout an organization, can influence the design of that organization will facilitate a motivating environment for public officials. Understanding the workings of the internal labor market of the service would seem a order focus of research.

_FACT FOUR_ . **The stock of human capital within the service is highly persistent** . Consistent with the employment protections that are afforded civil servants (so as to protect them from political interference), we observe civil servants spending much of their working life in the civil service, working with similar colleagues. Identifying how to optimize the productivity of existing civil servants will be key to the effectiveness of the public sector.

_FACT FIVE_ . **Non-market forces determine the incentives of civil servants** . Though pay and performance-linked bonuses may be a factor in civil servant performance, there appear to be a variety of other forces generating incentives within the bureaucracy. Correlations with productivity measures presented here imply that management structures and political engagements are of particular importance. This claim has been made by many other researchers, and we find evidence for it in our assessments of the nature of civil service work, motivational concerns and political interference.<sup>37</sup> How to create institutions that harness these incentives for improved service delivery would seem to be under-studied.

These observations have precedents in existing literature such as Gingerich (2013) that emphasizes the within-country variation in the capacity of state agencies. They also find support in cross-country data sets, on which most of the existing literature has been based. For example, in the Quality of Government Expert Survey 2015, country experts were asked the extent to which they agreed with the statement, ‘Once one is recruited as a public sector employee, one remains a public sector employee for the rest of one’s career’ on a scale from 1 (hardly ever) to 7 (almost always). 77% of countries fall into the middle grouping (4) or above, emphasizing the persistence of human capital in the service and the relevance of fact four. At the same time, the countries in the Quality of Government data span all seven categories, emphasising fact one.

The future of surveying in this field lies partly in identifying where commonalities, such as these facts, apply, and where they do not. As a complement to expert surveys, analysis of administrative data, and experiments, civil servants surveys provide both the breadth and depth of description required for such differentiation. Using civil servants surveys to generate more data on the micro-characteristics of civil servants will build our capacity to identify which aspects of the service are stylized within a country, or across the world, and which aspects are more mutable. Much of this paper has struggled with the distinct approaches to data collection taken by the surveys we have studied. However, their individual strengths have highlighted routes to better surveys.

> 37Motivational concerns, political interference and the nature of civil service work may make bureaucratic organizations even more ‘islands of concious power’ than bureaucracies within the private sector. As Aghion and Holden (2012) quote, “In his famous essay, Coase (1937) quotes the description of D. H. Robertson (1928, p. 85) that firms are ‘islands of conscious power in oceans of unconsciousness like lumps of butter coagulating in buttermilk.”’

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