process in detail.<sup>5</sup> Progress reports cover the _entire_ range of bureaucratic activity. While some of these projects are public-facing, others are purely internal functions or intermediate outputs. We were able to use quarterly and annual progress reports from bureaucracies to identify 3628 projects underway during 2015. The projects undertaken by each organization in a given year are determined through an annual planning and budgeting process jointly determined between: (i) the core executive, mainly the Ministry of Finance and the sector minister representing government priorities; (ii) the organization’s management, based in large part on consultatively developed medium-term plans; and (iii) ongoing donor programs. This schedule of projects is formalized in the organization’s annual budget (approved by Parliament) and annual workplan. The quarterly and annual reports that we use to code project completion thus detail the projects that the organization’s workplan committed the organization to working on during the time period of study.

Progress reports detail targets and achievements for individual projects the organization is charged to deliver. The Appendix describes how we hand-coded and harmonized the information to measure projects and project completion across the Ghanaian civil service. Three key points are of note in relation to this process. First, each quarterly progress report was codified into project line items using a team of trained research assistants and a team of civil servant officers seconded from the Management Services Department (MSD), an organization under OHCS tasked with analyzing and improving management in the civil service. MSD officers are trained in management and productivity analysis and frequently review organizational reports of this nature, making them ideally suited to judging project characteristics and completion.

Second, coders were tasked to record project completion on a 1-5 scoring grid, where a score of one corresponds to, “No action was taken towards achieving the target”, three corresponds to, “Some substantive progress was made towards achieving the target. The output is partially complete and/or important intermediate steps have been completed”, and a score of five corresponds to, “The target for the output has been reached or surpassed.” Projects can be long-term or repeated (e.g. annual, quarterly) projects. There were at least two coders per project. Given the tendency for averaging scores across coders to reduce variation, we use the maximum and minimum scores to code whether projects are fully complete/never initiated respectively (we later show robustness of our main result to alternative algorithms to aggregate scores).

Third, as progress reports are self-compiled by bureaucracies, an obvious concern is that low performing bureaucracies might intentionally manipulate their reports to hide the fact. To check the validity of progress reports, we matched a sub-sample of 14% of projects from progress reports to project audits conducted by external auditors through a separate exercise undertaken by OHCS. Auditors are mostly retired civil servants, overseen by OHCS, and they obtain documentary proof of project completion. For matched projects, 94% of the completion levels we code are corroborated 5 Where an organization produced multiple reports during this time (e.g. a mid-year report and an annual report), we selected the latest report produced during the year to include in our sample.

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