PART 5. Government Analytics Using External Assessments

Faisal Ali Baig, Zahid Hasnain, Turkan Mukhtarova, and Daniel Rogger

The chapter presents a guiding framework for using household survey microdata, readily available to most governments, to develop insights into the structure of the public sector workforce and the qualities of its compensation practices. National statistical authorities frequently collect labor force (and related) surveys which are broadly consistent across time and developed using globally standardized definitions and classification nomenclatures. This allows governments unique insights into the public sector workforce not afforded from relying solely on administrative datasets including the ability to juxtapose the demographics and skills composition of the public sector workforce with respect to the private sector and assess the equity and competitiveness of public sector compensation practices. This approach generates insights into public sector employment and wages and informs policy choices related to managing human resources in the public service.

Monica Brezzi and Santiago González

This chapter takes stock of the OECD work on defining and measuring what drives people’s trust in public institutions. It presents an updated framework on the public governance determinants of trust ratifying that competences (i.e. responsiveness and reliability) and values (i.e. openness, integrity and fairness) are fundamental public governance levers to improve or harm levels of trust in different institutions, while also recognizing the importance of people’s perception on how intergenerational and global challenges are handled by institutions, as well cultural, economic and political drivers. In addition, it shows that based on this framework it is possible to advance in gathering citizens’ evaluation of functioning of governments and public governance, by designing nationally representative population surveys with high quality statistical standards. The OECD Survey on the Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions (OECD Trust Survey) has been specifically designed and tested to capture people’s expectations of and experiences with public institutions around the five drivers of trust while allowing to control for socioeconomic, political and institutional characteristics. In a handful of countries that, in addition have conducted in depth case studies, the evidence resulting from the survey has proven a key input for improving policy making leading to concrete actions for building or strengthening institutional trust. The inaugural cross-country survey has been applied to 22 OECD countries at the end of 2021. Consolidating this evidence will be of essence for enhancing benchmarking and monitoring the evolution of policies over time.

Kathryn Andrews, Galileu Kim, Halsey Rogers, Jigyasa Sharma, and Sergio Venegas Marin

Public services such as primary healthcare and education have important consequences for social welfare and economic development. However, the quality of service delivery across the world is uneven. To improve it, practitioners require evidence to understand what is driving outcomes in education and health, such as student learning and prevalence of chronic diseases. Measures of Service Delivery (MSD) provide objective measurements of the quality of public service delivery. These indicators offer a granular view of the service delivery system, providing actionable insights on different parts of the delivery chain: from the physical infrastructure to the knowledge of frontline providers. This chapter provides an outline on how to conceptualize, measure and disseminate MSD, leveraging the institutional expertise of teams of practitioners at the World Bank. It offers actionable steps, advice, as well as connecting practitioners to wider, global efforts to improve the quality of public service delivery.

Colin Hoag, Josiah Heyman, Kristin Asdal, Hilde Reinertsen, and Matthew Hull

This paper aims to present an overview of how anthropologists study bureaucracy, and why that approach has value to the World Bank and their interlocutors. Anthropologists are most commonly associated with immersive, ethnographic methods such as participatory observation. In this paper we describe those methods and their usefulness, but we will also highlight the heterogeneity of empirical materials that anthropologists draw upon. The article makes the case that, while the ethnographic approach of anthropologists might sometimes be perceived as "messy" or "unstructured," in fact the efforts of anthropologists are motivated by an abiding concern with empirical rigor--a refusal to ignore any sort of data or to content oneself with a single view of such a multifarious thing as a bureaucracy. This is to say that an anthropological approach is a holistic one, which envisions bureaucracy as a rich, multidimensional world.