must be with its productivity. To date, there is very little in the way of a common consensus as to how to measure civil service productivity, and innovations in that area would be of benefit to our understanding of the service. However, this section will aim to discuss what civil servant surveys can tell us about the drivers of civil service productivity, by using bureaucrat assessments of organizational productivity.

We begin by reporting on the factors that civil servants believe are most significant in determining the productivity of their organizations. In a number of our surveys, officials were asked what the key drivers were in their own, or their organization’s, productivity. Of the 66% of officials in Ghana who believe there are objective performance standards to judge their organizations by, the average assessment of performance is that the organization is achieving those standards 75% of the time. Across organizations, the relatively normally-shaped distribution goes from 42% to 95%. They argue that the key requirements for better performance were more budgetary resources, including higher salaries, and better trained staff.

In Nigeria, officials were asked what the main reasons for public projects failing were. Only 4% of officials believed that it was because of the technical characteristics of projects. There was substantial support (31%) for a key problem being ineffective management of the project and its stakeholders. However, corruption was the leading issue, in the public sector (60% of respondents believed it was a ‘main reason’), in the local community (27%), and in the private sector (17%).<sup>30</sup> While we do not have civil servants’ own assessments of organizational productivity, Rasul and Rogger (2016) document independent evaluations of project implementation created by a subset of federal organizations in Nigeria and find that 38% of projects never start while 31% of projects are fully completed. They find that both management practices and civil servant assessments of the extent of corruption in an organization are significant predictors of these evaluations, in line with the claims outlined here.

In Pakistan, officials were asked whether the Federal Board of Revenue claimed that taxpayers were compliant (a key responsibility of the Board) when actually they were not. 57% of officials stated that this best described the FBR. This is in line with the findings of Khan, Khwaja and Olken (2015), who present evidence that taxation in Pakistan is a collusive bargaining game between taxpayers and tax officials. When asked why the Board was making such significant errors in compliance assessments, officials foremost pointed to mismanagement (unclear regulations, managers given unclear instructions) rather than to corruption. Political connections was stated by only 16% of officials to be significant.

A similar set of questions used in Pakistan were asked in the Philippines, with 54% of officials stating that their organization did not declare non-compliant individuals or organizations to be so in the relevant sector-specific regulations. In contrast to the Pakistani respondents however, the two main causes are said to be ‘Political connections’ and ‘Managerial favoritism’. This distinction is in line with Fafchamps and Labonne (2016) that finds private sector outcomes in the Philippines are closely linked to an individual’s political connections.

# **Bureaucratic Inputs**

As reported by public officials, the basis of productivity in the civil service seems to be a nexus of politics, corruption and management. In contrast, the principal-agent model of the bureaucracy emphasizes that a key input to the civil service is the efforts made by civil servants. In the next sub-section we will assess the relative explanatory power of these phenomenon. Here we outline what the surveys have to say about bureaucratic effort.

> 30The percentages add up to more than 100 as the officials were allowed to choose multiple answers. These are proportions of all respondents that chose that factor as a ‘main reason’.

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