# **1 Introduction**

The characteristics of a nation’s institutions have long been regarded as fundamental to national development. Appropriately designed public institutions are increasingly seen as key to prosperity (North, 1990; Finer, 1999; Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2005; World Development Report 2017). The organizations and individual public officials that make up those public institutions have recently been the subject of increasingly rigorous empirical investigation (Iyer and Mani, 2012; Dal Bo, Finan and Rossi, 2013; Bertrand, Burgess, Chawla and Xu, 2015; Finan, Olken and Pande, forthcoming). However, a broad or ‘thick’ description of these public organizations and officials based on rigorous data collection is absent from this literature.

Who are the bureaucrats that serve the world’s poorest people? What motivates them? What is their experience of being a public official in a developing country? There is little empirical evidence on civil servants in the developing world, despite their central role in the management of government policy there. Recent efforts to survey a relatively large number of civil servants in a few bureaucracies provides an opportunity to start building a picture of the way officials in poor countries work. By bringing together surveys of civil servants from across the developing world, this essay provides micro-evidence on the characteristics and experiences of public officials who serve the world’s poor.<sup>1</sup> These individuals matter to the macroeconomy. Public officials account for a third of paid employment in the developing world and their pay is a quarter of public sector spending. They implement the vast majority of public policy, and manage the regulation of the private sector. Their qualities and actions therefore have a direct impact on the working of a nation’s economy and welfare of its people. In terms of the production function of government, these individuals embody the human capital that is typically thought of as critical to productivity. The quality of the government’s organizational environment is akin to the technology term in a productivity decomposition.<sup>2</sup> Understanding the civil service is a window into the determinants of state capacity.

Despite their importance, it is only over the last ten years that efforts have been made to survey a representative sample of these officials, and go beyond basic personnel surveys to understand the daily experiences, challenges, and motivations of the individuals that execute national policy. This paper is thus a stocktaking of this first round of rigorous surveys of public officials.

Most of the surveys I discuss were undertaken by researchers working at, or in collaboration with, the World Bank. This is partly because the Bank provides a solid platform for engaging with governments across the developing world on a systematic basis. The median year of entry of the World Bank’s membership is 1963, implying the Bank has had relationships with its members for over 50 years on average. The Bank was also a global lead in early efforts at understanding and reforming the civil service. Internal reviews of this work, most famously IEG (2008), prompted the Bank to invest in architecture to improve the collection of data on particular civil services.

The intended purposes of the surveys and corresponding perspectives of the researchers are relatively diverse. By collating surveys undertaken by different research teams, this paper also provides an overview of the distinct approaches that have been taken in terms of surveying public officials on a scale sufficiently large for statistical analysis. This implies that the same information is not available for all of the

> 1This paper utilizes surveys for which there is strong evidence that the sample used was representative of the underlying target population. Previous surveys of civil servants surveys, such as Meyer-Sahling and Sass Mikkelsen (2016), are based on internet- or postal-surveys with concerns over representativeness. We include one study here with a response rate below 90%, partly to outline concerns with surveys of this type, but a strength of the surveys used here is their high response rate.

> 2Best et al (2017) argue that the majority of the variation (60%) in state effectiveness, proxied by prices paid for public sector procurement, is due to the individuals and organizations there.

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