# **1 Introduction**

A burgeoning area of social science research examines how state capabilities shape economic development [Besley and Persson 2011, Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, Pepinksy _et al._ 2017]. Much attention has been placed on understanding the e↵ectiveness of government bureaucracies, a key component of state capability. Bureaucratic e↵ectiveness matters for macroeconomic outcomes such as growth and inequality, and for microeconomics given the presumption that successful micro-evaluations of interventions can lead to them being e↵ectively scaled-up by government.

Despite the importance of bureaucratic e↵ectiveness, economic analysis of public sector agents has largely focused on the selection, retention, and response to incentives of frontline public sector workers, or ‘street-level’ bureaucrats. In contrast, we contribute to a nascent body of work studying the vital middle-tier of bureaucrats working in central government civil services, who are responsible for policymaking, administrative functions and for supervising frontline workers [Bertrand _et al._ 2017, Finan _et al._ 2017]. Specifically, we study whether the management practices that this professional class of civil servant bureaucrats operate under correlate to the e↵ective delivery of projects their Ministries and Departments are responsible for.<sup>1</sup> We do so in the context of a lower middle-income country, Ghana, at a time when many developing countries are engaged in reforming bureaucracies in line with the ‘good governance’ agenda of the World Bank and United Nations [Goldfinch _et al._ 2012, Hasnain _et al._ 2012].

Our analysis focuses on the professional grades of technical and administrative bureaucrats within 45 Ministries and Departments. To quantify the delivery of public projects, we exploit the fact that each organization is required to provide quarterly and annual progress reports. These detail targets and achievements for individual projects the organization is charged to deliver. Progress reports cover the _entire_ range of bureaucratic activity, including project types that have been much studied, such as procurement and infrastructure, but also areas of activity that have been far less subject to quantitative study, such as policy development, advocacy, human resource management, budgeting and regulatory design. We use these progress reports to identify 3628 projects underway during 2015, and to hand-code each project’s initiation and full completion.

To measure the management practices bureaucrats operate under, we follow the methodological approach of Bloom and Van Reenen [2007], and Bloom _et al._ [2012] (henceforth BSVR). We adapt their management surveys to the Ghanaian public sector setting, taking account of insights from the public administration literature [Rose-Ackerman 1986, Wilson 1989]. We elicited details on management practices in an _individual_ survey administered to bureaucrats. The surveys

> 1There are well-documented reasons why management practices could have di↵erent impacts on middle-tier bureaucrats than for lower-tier frontline public sector workers [Dixit 2002]. The selection, objectives and motivations of middle-tier of bureaucrats might di↵er. The nature of work for middle-tier bureaucrats might also di↵er: they might need to multi-task, and the mapping between e↵ort inputs and observable output is perhaps more uncertain. Finally, there can be specific labor market rigidities applying to middle-tier bureaucrats, leading to di↵erent dynamic selection e↵ects than for frontline workers.

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