based on the qualitative descriptions of completion in audits.<sup>6</sup>

# **2.2 What Do Bureaucrats Do?**

The data reveals the importance of non-infrastructure projects in the work of bureaucracies. Figure 1A shows the most common project type in Ghanaian central government bureaucracies relates to human resource management (‘monitoring, training and personnel management’). Comprising 29% of all projects, this reinforces the importance of understanding whether the management practices bureaucrats operate under correlate to bureaucratic e↵ectiveness. The Figure also shows that 23% of projects relate to policy advocacy and development, while the two traditional areas of quantitative study, infrastructure and procurement, together comprise around a third of projects.

In Figure 1B, each bar corresponds to a project type, and within-bar colors signify projects conducted by a given organization. This reveals that: (i) the same project type is implemented by multiple organizations; (ii) each organization is tasked to implement multiple project types. Hence a lack of specialization is a fundamental feature of the Ghanaian civil service. Such a lack of specialization was also an inherent feature documented in RR in the context of the Nigerian Civil Service. We thus exploit a research design that measures the partial correlation of management practices with public service delivery _within_ project type, so accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in bureaucracies arising from the composition of projects they are tasked to implement. If project types vary in the optimal set of management practices, this lack of specialization leaves more scope for management practices to matter on the margin (even conditional on project type fixed e↵ects). This situation can persist given the rigidities in the labor market for bureaucrats, which slows down the di↵usion of information on best management practices.

Table 1 and Figure 2 show how bureaucratic output varies by project type. Table 1 reiterates that all project types are implemented by the majority of organizations. On completion rates, the first bar in Figure 2 shows that 21% of projects are never started (i.e. are recorded as a one on the scoring card); 34% are fully completed. The variation on the extensive margin of project completion varies by project type. For example, procurement projects are more than twice as likely not to be initiated as permits and regulation projects. However, there is considerable variation in average completion rates even within project types (Column 5, Table 1).

Figure 3 focuses on the variation in completion rates across civil service organizations. To quantify this variation, we note that the 75th percentile organization has an average completion rate 22% higher than 25th percentile organization. This variation occurs despite the fact that multiple organizations engage in similar project types, they are assigned hires from the same pool of incoming bureaucrats, and they are located close to each other in Accra.<sup>7</sup> Figure 3 further

> 6Among the handful of non-corroborated projects, the lowest “true” completion rate was a 3, indicating that the rare instances of misreporting were relatively minor.

> 7As we use the minimum and maximum of reports for the extensive margin of project output, it is possible that the percentage of initiated projects is below that for completed projects, as occurs in one organization.

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