Management of Bureaucrats and Public Service Delivery: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service
Year: 2013
Type: book
Abstract: We study how the management practices that bureaucrats operate under correlate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered. We do so in a developing country context, exploiting data from the Nigerian Civil Service. For 4700 public sector projects, we have hand coded independent engineering assessments of each project’s completion rate and delivered quality. We supplement this with a survey eliciting management practices for bureaucrats in the 63 civil service organizations responsible for these projects, following the approach of Bloom and Van Reenen [2007]. Management practices matter: a one standard deviation increase in autonomy for bureaucrats corresponds to signi…cantly higher project completion rates of 18%; a one standard deviation increase in management practices related to incentives and monitoring corresponds to signi…cantly lower project completion rates of 14%. provide evidence that the negative impacts of incentive provision/monitoring arise because bureaucrats multi-task and incentives are poorly targeted, and because these management practices capture elements of subjective performance evaluation that leave further scope for dysfunctional responses from bureaucrats. Our results provide novel insights into how small
Authors: Imran Rasul, Daniel Rogger
Language: English
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G7847409227, G887941432
OpenAlex ID: W2526378848