A DIME Policy Brief on the wider engagement with the Ghanaian Government that acted as the platform for this research can be found here.
The wider Ghana project in which this paper was produced was chosen by the International Growth Centre as one of their `Transformational Change Cases'.
Winner of the World Bank's Latin America and Caribbean `Most Innovative Research Relevant to the Region' Award 2023
[WP] Kevin Croke, Benjamin Daniels, Meyhar Mohammed, Daniel Rogger and Katre Väärsi (2023) Designing responsive performance metrics for health care providers: Evidence from the Estonian Quality Bonus Scheme [click for abstract]
The World Bank Working Paper version (10333) can be accessed here. Note that this differs from the published article to the extent that it is framed as 'A Foundation for Research on Public Servants around the World' and thus has corresponding differences.
Bureaucratic effectiveness is an important input into state capacity. The tasks public officials choose to spend their time on determines how their human capital impacts national development. Yet empirical evidence on the measurement and allocation of public officials’ time use is scarce. We provide empirical evidence in this domain through a survey experiment with Ethiopian bureaucrats. We randomly test alternative measures of bureaucratic time use by varying recall period, enumeration methodology and the degree of task detail in recall surveys. Relative to time-use diaries, we find that the best-performing survey modules differ by roughly a third of working time and that requesting more detailed breakdowns of time use significantly increases this disparity. We explore empirically how the allocation of time use correlates with individual characteristics, management practices, and service delivery outcomes.
We study the relationship between management practices, organizational performance, and task clarity, using observational data analysis on an original survey of the universe of Ghanaian civil servants across 45 organizations and novel administrative data on over 3,600 tasks they undertake. We first demonstrate that there is a large range of variation across government organizations, both in management quality and in task completion, and show that management quality is positively related to task completion. We then provide evidence that this association varies across dimensions of management practice. In particular, task completion exhibits a positive partial correlation with management practices related to giving staff autonomy and discretion, but a negative partial correlation with practices related to incentives and monitoring. Consistent with theories of task clarity and goal ambiguity, the partial relationship between incentives/monitoring and task completion is less negative when tasks are clearer ex ante and the partial relationship between autonomy/discretion and task completion is more positive when task completion is clearer ex post. Our findings suggest that organizations could benefit from providing their staff with greater autonomy and discretion, especially for types of tasks that are ill-suited to predefined monitoring and incentive regimes.
Kerenssa Kay, Daniel Rogger and Iman Sen (2020) Bureaucratic Locus of Control, Governance 33 (4): pp.871-896 [click for abstract | replication files]
To what extent do public officials feel they have control over their lives in public service? We develop a new measure of perceived control in the bureaucracy based on the locus of control index. The ‘Bureaucratic Locus of Control’ (BLOC) index extends standard measures to a bureaucratic context as well as introduces an extension to these measures that focuses on the power of systemic forces in officials’ lives. Field tests amongst a representative sample of Ethiopian public officials suggest that the BLOC index has good internal reliability and that it is positively associated with promotion opportunities, rewards and motivation. We showcase its use by investigating the extent to which inequality in control impacts the general perception of control. Potential uses of the scale to study bureaucratic dynamics are discussed.
Schuster, Christian ® Lauren Weitzman ® Kim Sass Mikkelsen ® Jan Meyer-Sahling ® Katherine Bersch ® Francis Fukuyama ® Patricia Paskov ® Daniel Rogger ® Dinsha Mistree ® Kerenssa Kay (2020) Responding to COVID-19 Through Surveys of Public Servants, Public Administration Review 80 (5): pp.792-796 [click for abstract]
The World Bank Working Paper version (8554) can be accessed here.
A comic strip abstract for this paper can be found here on the 'Let's Talk Development' blog, and is below...
[WP] Aidan Coville and Daniel Rogger (2018) Who Visits Villages? Evidence from Visitor Books [click for abstract]
How does the outside world enter village life? Understanding who visits a village, and when, requires comprehensive records of visitors and their purpose. Fortunately, many rural communities keep exactly that - detailed visitor log books that record visits from external organizations. We use a sample of such books to provide a detailed picture of the outside world's engagement with villages in Tanzania. Government officials make up half of these visits, and visit most intensively at the start of the year, and at the start of the week. The top three reasons for visits are related to social services in the health, water and agriculture/environment sectors. The paper argues why visitor books are a potentially useful source of data on the experience of villagers and the activities of the public officials who serve them.
We study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under correlate to the quantity of public services delivered, using data from the Nigerian Civil Service. We have hand-coded independent engineering assessments of 4700 project completion rates. We supplement this with a management survey in the bureaucracies responsible for these projects, building on Bloom and Van Reenen [2007]. Management practices matter: increasing bureaucrats’ autonomy is positively associated with completion rates, yet practices related to incentives/monitoring of bureaucrats are negatively associated with completion rates. Our evidence provides new insights on the importance of management in public bureaucracies in a developing country setting.
Who are the civil servants that serve poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct surveys of civil servants - the professional body of administrators who manage government policy - and their organisations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, to highlight key aspects of their characteristics and experience of civil service life. Civil servants in the developing world face myriad challenges to serving the world’s poor, from limited facilities to significant political interference in their work. There are a number of commonalities across service environments, and the paper tries to summarise these in a series of ‘stylized facts’ of the civil service in the developing world. At the same time, the particular challenges faced by a public official vary substantially across and within countries and regions. For example, measured management practices differ widely across local governments of a single state in Nigeria. Using micro-level surveys of civil servants allows us to document these differences, build better models of the public sector, and make more informed policy choices.
An online appendix provides an overview of the major civil servant surveys of the last decade or so.
The World Bank Working Paper version (8051) can be accessed here.
My associated 'Governance for Development' blog is here.
This paper explores the use of public appointments as an incentive for public action. In particular, it assesses whether making someone an honorary public official within a community shifts their identity or broader incentives towards the community’s aggregate welfare. We present a model of public appointments and test its predictions in a real-world appointment scheme focussed on residential streets in a borough of London, UK. We find that pure public appointments, with no accompanying increase in powers, increases citizens' efforts towards the production of street cleansing and beautification on their respective streets. Incentives accompanying the appointments turn out to be necessary for us to be able to detect substantive changes in the provision of these local public goods and on measures of social capital amongst neighbours. The nature of accompanying incentives influences the outcome of the appointment scheme. A regime that emphasizes citizens' identity as change agents in the community is more effective in improving citizen satisfaction with their neighbourhood, whilst incentives provided at the community level generate greater social cohesion amongst neighbours. The paper provides some of the first evidence of the incentive regimes that might underlie long-term service contracts between citizens and the state, and highlights the potential boundaries of citizen involvement in delivering public services.
We document the correlation between the workplace diversity in bureaucratic organizations and public service delivery. We do so in the context of Nigeria, where ethnicity is a salient form of self-identity. We thus expand the empirical management literature highlighting beneficial effects of workplace diversity, that has focused on private sector firms operating in high-income settings. Our analysis combines two data sources: (i) a survey to over 4000 bureaucrats eliciting their ethnic identities; (ii) independent engineering assessments of completion rates for 4700 public sector projects. The ethnic diversity of bureaucracies matters positively: a one standard deviation increase in the ethnic diversity of bureaucrats corresponds to 9% higher completion rates. In line with the management literature from private sector firms in high-income countries, this evidence highlights a potentially positive side of ethnic diversity in public sector organizations, in the context of Sub Saharan Africa.
On an ad hoc basis, I intend to publish an overview of research on the delivery of public services in the developing world, based on interviews with researchers and practitioners actively working in the field.
[WP] Daniel Rogger (2019), “Delivering Public Services in the Developing World: Frontiers of Research II ” [click for abstract]
This essay presents a view of the frontiers of research on public service delivery in the developing world, based on a series of interviews with researchers and practitioners actively working in this field. It reviews how far the research literature has come since the publication of the World Development Report 2004 ten years ago. There is growing interest in expanding standard intervention-based research to determine effective methods for its delivery. However, a lack of data on the internal workings of many providers inhibits rapid progress in the development of this literature.
This essay presents a view of the frontiers of research on public service delivery in the developing world, based on a series of interviews with researchers and practitioners actively working in this field. It recognizes the lasting contribution of the theoretical framework laid down by the World Development Report 2004 that emphasized accountability, and the randomized evaluations that have taken place to test and develop this theory. Research on other questions, such as those relating to the analysis of politics and the structure and organization of government, is at an earlier stage, and is likely to need a more structural approach. There are many questions still to be answered in this field.
I am the co-editor, with Christian Schuster, of a handbook on measurement in the public administration for the World Bank. The full Handbook, titled 'The Government Analytics Handbook: Leveraging Data to Strengthen Public Administration' is available at www.worldbank.org/governmentanalytics.
Chapter 13: Jane Adjabeng, Eugenia Adomako-Gyasi, Moses Akrofi, Maxwell Ampofo, Margherita Fornasari, Ignatius Geegbae, Allan Kasapa, Jennifer Ljungqvist, Wilson Metronao Amevor, Felix Nyarko Ampong, Josiah Okyere Gyimah, Daniel Rogger, Nicholas Sampah and Martin Williams (2023) Government Analytics Using Data on the Quality of Processes
Francis Fukuyama ® Daniel Rogger ® Zahid Hasnain ® Katherine Bersch ® Dinsha Mistree ® Christian Schuster ® Kim Sass Mikkelsen ® Kerenssa Kay ® Jan Meyer-Sahling (2021) 'Global Survey of Public Servants Indicators'. Available at www.globalsurveyofpublicservants.org/datadownloads [see related Tableau Dashboard of Indicators]
All data sets from surveys undertaken at the World Bank under the Bureaucracy Lab that I co-lead should be uploaded at the World Bank's microcatalogue and either be associated directly with me (search for the name "Rogger") or under the title "Survey of Public Servants". For example, Daniel Rogger (2010) 'Survey of Nigerian Civil Servants,' is available at the World Bank's microcatalogue here [further information/codebook available at link/microcatalogue]
We present the first descriptive look at dynamic spending patterns across a large representative sample of infrastructure projects, using unique project-year level panel data covering the universe of infrastructure projects conducted by the Government of Bangladesh between 2003 and 2013. This initial research allows us to draw two main preliminary conclusions: First, projects seem to follow a non-linear spending pattern, spending less in early stages of a project’s life, and more in the latter half of a project’s implementation period. This is true for both complete and incomplete projects, and shows that underspends do not appear only because projects get abandoned, but rather seem to be an issue arising early in a project’s life and surviving throughout. This suggests investigating further the planning and early life of projects. Second, when comparing complete and incomplete projects, we observe that successfully completed projects overall did better at predicting this non-linear spending trend, required smaller revisions to planned spendings, and departed less from plan throughout the life of a project. Implementation dynamics and a project’s completion status are therefore indeed correlated, and this relation should be explored further.
Emla Fitzsimons et al. (2012), “UK Development Aid” Institute for Fiscal Studies Green Budget 2012, pp. 142 - 161
In 2010, the UK government spent £8.45 billion – 0.57% of Gross National Income (GNI) – on Overseas Development Aid (ODA), mainly through the Department for International Development. This is set to rise to £12 billion in 2013 in order to fulfil the commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on ODA, something that is particularly controversial against the backdrop of fiscal austerity for almost all other areas of public expenditure. The decision to increase aid spending raises some obvious questions and concerns.
Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Effects of climate change on health will affect most populations in the next decades and put the lives and wellbeing of billions of people at increased risk. During this century, earth’s average surface temperature rises are likely to exceed the safe threshold of 2°C above preindustrial average temperature. Rises will be greater at higher latitudes, with medium-risk scenarios predicting 2–3°C rises by 2090 and 4–5°C rises in northern Canada, Greenland, and Siberia. In this report, we have outlined the major threats - both direct and indirect - to global health from climate change through changing patterns of disease, water and food insecurity, vulnerable shelter and human settlements, extreme climatic events, and population growth and migration. Although vector-borne diseases will expand their reach and death tolls, especially among elderly people, will increase because of heatwaves, the indirect effects of climate change on water, food security, and extreme climatic events are likely to have the biggest effect on global health.
This is a fictional story, in the form of a graphic novel, that sketches the passage of a public project through a developing country government. It aims to introduce the reader to the challenges of delivering public services in the developing world.
Alex Armand et al. (2009), 'Assessing the Impact of Infant Mortality upon the Fertility Decisions of Mothers in India', Aenorm 64:17 (chosen as the best overall paper submitted to the Econometric Game 2009 judges)
Interdisciplinary collaboration has recently been attracting increasing support as an approach to research. Universities are setting up interdisciplinary institutes and schools. Funding bodies are earmarking increasingly large sums to collaborative research projects. Historically hailed as a paradigm but underfunded, interdisciplinarity finally seems to be hitting the financial big time.