Introducing the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators: A New Global Dataset on Public Sector Employment and Compensation

• Published date: 01 May 2021
• Author: Faisal Ali Baig,Xu Han,Zahid Hasnain,Daniel Rogger
• Date: 01 May 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13355

564 Public Administration Review • May | June 202 1

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 3, pp. 564–571. © 2021 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13355.

Introducing the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators: A New

Global Dataset on Public Sector Employment and

Compensation

Abstract: The public sector employs roughly a third of the world’s paid workforce. Their wages not only represent

the income of a substantial portion of the population but also influence pay setting across the rest of the economy.

However, global data on employment and compensation within the public sector, and how these compare to the private

sector, has been limited to date. This paper describes a novel dataset produced by the World Bank’s “Bureaucracy

Lab” attempting to fill this gap. The “Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators” (WWBI) are compiled from over 53

million unique observations and consist of 63,282 individual observations across 92 variables of the characteristics of

public-sector employment, compensation, and the overall wage bill for 132 countries between 2000 and 2018. The

indicators, constructed from nationally representative household surveys, present a micro-founded picture of public

sector labor markets across the world.

Evidence for Practice

• The Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI) provide the most comprehensive global data published to

date on employment and compensation in both the public and private sectors.

• The WWBI draws on millions of observations of individuals from household surveys across the world to

provide a globally uniform set of country-level indicators.

• Coherent and harmonized data on public sector employment and compensation provides policymakers with

benchmarks for wage setting across countries.

• The dataset provides coherent descriptions of the demographics of the public service, pay levels, employment

size, and relative wage levels. It indicates that public employees are older and more educated than their

private sector counterparts, and the gender distribution more even.

• The WWBI are an opportunity for policymakers to better understand where their country fits in the

landscape of public sector employment and pay, and for academics to understand stylized facts of public

service compensation. The public sector does, on average, pay more than the private sector for similarly

qualified individuals in a majority of countries, but skilled and senior public employees tend to earn a lower

wage than their counterparts in the private sector.

Public administration matters for the delivery

of government services, the provision of

infrastructure, and the effectiveness of

regulation (Arizti et al.2020; Ingraham, Joyce,

and Donahue2003; Moynihan and Beazley2016;

Rasul and Rogger2018). Public institutions also

have an impact on fiscal sustainability and the

competitiveness of the overall labor market (Hasnain

et al.2019). The public personnel that administers

the state and staff public institutions are therefore

a critical element of the state. By association,

their employment and compensation are key

determinants of state productivity (Finan, Olken,

and Pande2017).

These personnel make up roughly a third of the world’s

paid employees. This implies that public officials are

not just important as an input into state capacity, but

as an important segment of the economy. Further,

since the public sector labor market is relatively

insulated from market wage adjustment mechanisms,

government pay policies can impact the rest of the

economy simply through offering compensation

packages that differ from the private sector (Behar

and Mok2013). For these reasons, understanding the

nature of employment and compensation across public

administrations is of substantive importance to the

management and understanding of the state. However,

empirical analysis of public administration across-

and within-countries has been constrained by a lack

of coherent comparative data on bureaucracy, or the

public sector as a whole.

†Authors are listed in alphabetic order.

World Bank Group

University of Maryland

Faisal Ali Baig†

Xu Han

Zahid Hasnain

Daniel Rogger

World Bank Group

Daniel Rogger is a Research Economist

in the Development Impact Evaluation

Research Department at the World Bank.

Email: drogger@worldbank.org

Zahid Hasnain is a Senior Public Sector

Specialist with the World Bank.

Email: zhasnain@worldbank.org

Xu Han is a PhD candidate at the

University of Maryland, College Park.

Email: erichan@umd.edu

Faisal Ali Baig is a Public Sector

Specialistwith the World Bank.

Email: mbaig5@worldbank.org

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