Management of Bureaucrats and Public Service Delivery: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service

Abstract

We study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under correlate with the quantity of public services delivered, using data from the Nigerian Civil Service. We have hand-coded independent engineering assessments of 4,700 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.

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