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local consultants. They are frequently undertaken under difficult conditions and tend to use no standardized methodology. On average, censuses take several months to complete, but the time required to carry them out varies with the skill of the investigators, the size of the team, and the size of the civil service. Civil service censuses are vulnerable to fraud; investigators may be subject to pressures or payments from interested parties, or they may fall victim to strong inclinations to finesse already existing staffing lists rather than taking the trouble to collect clean information. Still, in countries where virtually nothing is known about actual numbers of public and/or civil servants, sometimes even partial data gathered through a census may provide a starting point for policy reform efforts.

# Functional Reviews

Functional reviews of the public administration constitute another prerequisite to pay and employment reform. Such reviews examine the functional staffing requirements of government on a min<sup>4</sup> stry by ministry basis, matching tasks with objectives and identifying the number and type of staff necessary to carry out these essential activities as compared to the established or authorized positions, and to those officials actually in post. Thus, staff surpluses and shortfalls can be identified on a technical basis, and, in theory, redundancies can be eliminated. Such a review was executed in the Gambia with bi-lateral assistance in support of both a Fund program and a Bank Structural Adjustment Credit and was the basis for a large-scale staff reduction carried out in 1986 and 1987. In Senegal, the Bureau of Organization and Methods (BOM)of the Office of the President has attempted to carry out such a review, but few ministries have cooperated in this process. A functional review has also been suggested by the Bank to carry forward employment and pay reforms in Ghana, and is being financed by the recently approved Structural Adjustment Institutional Support Project. In addition, several national civil service commissions have carried out similar exercises on their own.

As the basis for public pay and employment reform, functional reviews provide technical guidance to policy makers as to where, if necessary, changes can and should be made in the employment structure. To the extent that they have such management decision uses, functional reviews thus constitute a more sophisticated tool than civil service censuses (which provide only raw numbers). They also supply a credible, technical rationale for the difficult, political decision of employment reduction. A few prominent consulting firms have developed functional review methodologies that borrow heavily from work carried out in advanced industrial countries. Concerns have been expressed that these reviews are expensive and time-consuming (in the Gambia a three-person team took six months to review a civil service of approximately 15,000). Given delicate political circumstances, personnel reduction reforms may be more successful if they are carried out swiftly, so some countries may be unable to wait for the completion of a detailed functional review before taking action. In addition, questions have been raised about the propriety and difficulty of expatriate consulting firms carrying out such delicate reviews. In Ghana, for example, government officials were reportedly uncomfortable with this prospect. In Senegal, the resistance of various ministries to