By this definition, the span of control of senior bureaucrats over non-seniors is around 4 _._ 52, but again there is considerable variation across Ministries.<sup>4</sup> Around 45% of bureaucrats are women, 70% have a university education, and 31% have a postgraduate degree (seniors are more likely to be men, and have a postgraduate degree). As in other state organizations, civil service bureaucrats enjoy stable employment once in service: the average bureaucrat has 14 years in service, with their average tenure in the current organization being just under 9 years. This reflects some of the rigidities in the labor market for bureaucrats: appointments are made centrally by OHCS, bureaucrats enjoy secure tenure and transitions between bureaucracies are infrequent.

Our analysis is based on two data sources. First, we hand-coded quarterly and annual progress reports from Ministries and Departments, covering projects ongoing between January and December 2015. As detailed below, these reports enable us to code the individual projects under the remit of each organization, and the extent to which they are initiated or successfully completed. Second, we surveyed 2971 bureaucrats from all 45 civil service organizations over the period August to October 2015. Our civil servant survey covers 75% of _all_ professional bureaucrats in service, with 20% of interviewees being seniors. As detailed below, civil servants were questioned on topics including their background characteristics and work history in service, job characteristics and responsibilities, engagement with stakeholders outside the civil service, perceptions of corruption in the service, and their views on multiple dimensions of management practices. It is this last survey module from which we derive measures of management practice for each organization.

# **2.1 Coding Projects and Completion**

Worldwide, civil service bureaucracies di↵er greatly in whether and how they collect data on their performance. Unlike data related to the macroeconomy, households, firms, schools or labor markets, central statistical agencies are typically not involved in measuring government e↵ectiveness, and few international standards exist to aid cross country comparisons. To therefore quantify the delivery of public sector projects in our context, we exploit the fact that each Ghanaian civil service organization is required by OHCS to provide quarterly and annual progress reports. Organizations di↵er in their reporting formats and coverage, and some either did not produced reports for this time period or produced them in a format that was infeasible to code. We are thus able to use the progress reports of 30 Ministries and Departments (and our civil servant survey covers 2247 bureaucrats in these 30 organizations). Figure A1 provides a snapshot of a typical progress report and indicates the information coded from it, and the Data Appendix discusses the coding

> 4In Ghana, grades of technical and administrative bureaucrats are officially referred to as ‘senior’ officers while grades covering cleaners, drivers etc. are referred to as ‘junior’ officers, regardless of their tenure or seniority. While we restrict our sample to ‘senior’ officers in the formal terminology, throughout we use the terms senior and non-senior in their more colloquial sense to refer to hierarchical relationships within the professional grades.

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