regard—with the important caveat that the staff positions (i.e., technical staff through to director general) in the left panel are ranked only in Grades 3 to 5 in the right panel, with no exact match from position to grade because of the career regime. The base salary distribution (Figure 8) shows more typical overlap between salary bands. The compensation scale (Figure 7), shows that allowances at the higher end both decompress the salary structure significantly and—moving up the pay scale—appear to shrink the range of compensation. In other words, because allowances are an increasing proportion of total compensation moving up the salary structure, they ensure two things: first, that civil servants filling senior positions are indeed being compensated significantly more than rank-and-file employees; and, second, that the range of compensation across those senior positions is tighter than looking at base salary alone would suggest.

**Figure 7: Range of average monthly total compensation Figure 8: Range of base salary across grades across ranks**

<!-- Start of picture text --> 1,700 1,700<br>1,500 1,500<br>1,300 1,300<br>1,100 1,100<br>900 900<br>700 700<br>500 500<br>300 300<br>Technical Deputy Head of Deputy Director Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3 Grade 4 Grade 5<br>staff head of division director general<br>division general<br>Montly base salay, '000 kip<br>Total monthly compensation, '000 kip<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Source: GOL; World Bank analysis_ A similar micro analysis of the monthly compensation of health and education sector staff also reveals a stable workforce with long years of experience, and a range in grades for each type of position [Annex 2]. For the payroll sample available, service delivery workers in health and education make roughly between 75 to 85 percent of their total remuneration in the form of base salary. Thus, the share of allowances in total earnings is somewhat less than for managerial-level ministry workers, but these data do not include ad hoc payments for overtime, shift work, special tasks (e.g., surgery), or bonuses that are likely to be more of a factor in service delivery facilities (especially health care) than for ministry jobs.

The Lao government practice of per diem payments for in-country travel can lead to additional dutyrelated, albeit non-regular, compensation that rivals or even exceeds total monthly earnings from base salary and allowances. A five-night trip generates per diem payments of at least 900,000 kip, of which only some part is needed to defray food and lodging expenses. Civil servants and officials interviewed confirmed that a substantial fraction of per diem payments is legally pocketed as additional compensation, which substantially supplements monthly compensation levels. How much a civil servant can save out of these non-regular payments, or ‘per diem savings,’ is impossible to capture systematically, since practices vary widely. For the purposes of an indicative assessment, however, we asked officials to estimate ranges of how much various positions might expect to save in terms of per diems each month. More senior civil servants are more likely to be able to save a larger proportion of the total payments, since they are more likely also to be given meals and accommodation in-kind. Technical staff or more junior managers are 23