relatively limited correlations between the demographic structure of the civil service or the civil servant experience with productivity. Where we see significant impacts, following the observations made by officials themselves at the start of this section, are in the areas of corruption and management.

The variable ‘frequency of observation of corruption’ is an organization average of the proportion of projects on which public officials see their colleagues “breaking service rules for their own benefit”. This is highly predictive of the proportion of a project or program that is completed at an organization. The coefficient is close to 1, indicating that a 1 percentage point increase in the average observation of corruption leads to a 1 percentage point reduction in organizational output. As has been shown in many other settings, corruption is bad for public sector productivity.

Column 7 also includes the management indices of Rasul and Rogger (2016), which follow the World Management Survey methodology described earlier. The quality of management index follows the public administration literature by splitting management into its autonomy components and its incentive components. The autonomy index captures the extent to which bureaucrats input into policy formulation and implementation processes, and the flexibility with bureaucrats can be reorganized to respond to best practice and project peculiarities. The incentives/monitoring based management index captures the extent to which an organization collects indicators of project performance, how these indicators are reviewed, and whether bureaucrats are rewarded for achievements reflected in these indicators. Though the Ghana survey did not follow the WMS methodology, I have created proxies for these two indices from the Ghana survey that align as closely to the WMS questions as possible.

We see that in both Ghana and Nigeria, the coefficient on the autonomy index is positive, and the coefficient on the incentives index is negative, with the coefficients in Nigeria being significant at the 1% level. Rasul and Rogger (2016) interpret the negative effects of the incentive index through the lens of public sector incentive theory. They argue that bureaucrats might need to exert multiple effort types, not all of which are measurable, and performance incentives shift their efforts towards the contractable elements of public projects at the cost of the project as a whole. Management matters in the public sector.

Interestingly, the Nigeria results do not echo those of Ghana on political interference, and the coefficients are in fact positive. The idea of ‘political interference’ being positive is theoretically plausible. The legislature is supposed to keep track of, and discipline the executive when it is not performing. It is only when legislatures overstep their responsibilities and intervene in processes that are supposed to be politically neutral, might there be negative consequences (though of course they could still be informally coaching bureaucrats to perform). The question underlying the Ghanaian measure of political interference focuses on personnel decisions, perhaps an area of civil service business that should have no political interference. The question underlying the Nigerian measure is broader, asking “In what proportion of the projects [that you have worked on for this organization] have [relevant politician] intervened in the implementation of a project?” This could be for both positive and negative reasons.

Given the comparatively rich nature of the Nigeria survey, we can tease apart this difference by looking at variables that do not have comparators in the Ghana data. The extent to which political interference is informal, rather than undertaken through formal processes such as legislative committees, might be proxied by the _personal_ engagements public officials have with politicians. The Nigeria questionnaire asked officials to “Think about recent projects and/or programmes you worked on for this organization. How often, if at all, do you _personally_ engage with members of the following groups in the work that you do?” (emphasis in original). The questionnaire then listed federal, state and local politician as options. Column 9 of Table 6 includes averages of these measures for each organization.

In the specification of Column 9, the results on corruption and management continue to hold, but 30