Comparing Ghana with Nigeria on wages (or as they phrased it, ‘salary’ and ‘income’ respectively), seems a relatively uncontroversial comparison in terms of wording and has the advantage of the two countries being neighbors. Ghanaian civil servants are certainly less satisfied with their wage (18% satisfied including neutral responses) than Nigerians (54%). The concern with comparing these to the Philippines “pay you receive for your work” (57%) is that the latter potentially anchors the respondent to their base wage, rather than additional benefits provided by their organization to all staff. Making the leap to the framing used in Indonesia (49%) and Pakistan (82%), which is relative to other ministries seems ambitious. In fact, the difference in wording may explain why Pakistan’s average is so much higher than the other countries. Ministry of Finance staff, the focus of the Pakistan survey, typically have some of the highest wages in government, making their wage relatively satisfactory compared with other ministries. However, this does not imply that a Ministry of Finance official is satisfied with their wage in a more general sense.

Comparing the data across different questions, we can correlate the extent to which satisfaction with the public sector is driven by satisfaction with wages. Within country, the correlation is surprisingly low, at 0.20 in Ghana, 0.18 in Indonesia, 0.24 in Nigeria and 0.05 in Pakistan. These are large enough to be significant (positive) predictors of overall job satisfaction and support experimental evidence such as Dal Bo et al (2013) and Ashraf et al (2015) that suggest high wages are an important part of the motivation to work in the public sector. However, they leave the vast majority of that satisfaction unexplained. While pay may be a component of the motivation of public officials, these correlations imply that other factors are also predictive. For example, whether civil servants believe they are working within a well functioning organization is more predictive of their satisfaction than income across all of our surveys.<sup>25</sup> This would support the view of Perry and Hondegheim (2008) that civil servants are motivated by the non-monetary rewards of working within the service.<sup>26</sup> This discussion illustrates a disadvantage of the fragmented survey efforts that this paper relies on. We have been fortunate so far in that the surveys collected some variables in a relatively homogenous way allowing us to make comparisons across civil services. However, for a number of key topics such as satisfaction, the questions are sufficiently different to cast doubt on the usefulness of direct comparison. For core topics in the civil service such as the degree and nature of public official’s motivation, a system of surveys that implemented a common module would be of significant value to our undertaking comparative public administration analysis. For a consensus to be built around what the appropriate set of questions should be for the civil service setting, there is a need for experimentation with the methodology of surveying in the public sector.

# **Between Sectors**

Much of the study of the public service has been fragmented into sectors such as health, education and finance. There are large literatures on doctors and nurses, teachers, central bankers, budget officers,

> 25In Indonesia, the adjusted R-squared of a regression of job satisfaction on a binary variable that indicates officials ‘Agree’ or ‘Strongly agree’ with the statement, “You are proud to work at your K/L” is 0.07 versus 0.03 for a similar regression on income satisfaction, with corresponding coefficients of 0.29 and 0.12. In Pakistan, the adjusted R-squared of a regression of job satisfaction on a binary variable that indicates officials ‘Agree’ or ‘Strongly agree’ with the statement, “The FBR is functioning very well” is 0.05 versus 0.00 for a similar regression on income satisfaction, with corresponding coefficients of 0.21 and 0.06.

> 26An interesting caveat to these findings comes from Nigeria, where we have both organization-level turnover rates, as well as average levels of satisfaction across multiple domains. By regressing the latter of these on the former, we can identify the behavioural response from poor satisfaction with ‘Current job’, ‘Current income’, ‘Working conditions’, ‘Opportunities for self-improvement’ and ‘Rewards for good performance’. Which of these makes people more likely to leave an organization? Dissatisfaction with income and with rewards are the only variables that significantly predict (at the normal levels) higher turnover rates. Given the discussion above on the characteristics of individuals who transition across the service, it may be that they are more responsive to financial concerns than their colleagues.

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