The paper provides a detailed description of a novel dataset on education attainment in public administrations covering the period 1981-2011 for 178 countries. The dataset uses information extracted from CVs for over 130,000 mid to senior level officials from mainly central banks and ministries of economy and finance.
Key findings:
- The main finding is that there is little heterogeneity across regions when considering a non quality-adjusted measure of education attainment in public administrations. Adjusting the measure for quality, using a country wide academic ranking, reveals important cross-regional heterogeneity differing from that of standard measures of education attainment for the general population.
- The analysis of the dataset also uncovers important patterns in public administrations’ education attainment along gender and seniority across regions. Women who are hired are as educated as their male colleagues, but less women than men are hired and even less are promoted to senior management positions.
- A few applications of the dataset provide some evidence of (i) the importance of salary incentives in attracting highly educated staff and (ii) a positive association between education attainment in public administrations and government effectiveness (e.g. higher tax revenue mobilization, limiting corruption, better public finance management and private market support).
- There are significant differences between education attainment in the general population and education attainment in public administrations. Caution should thus be taken in using education attainment in the general population as a proxy for education attainment in public administrations when trying to answer questions relating to state capacity. This dataset may allow to address some of those questions much more directly and opens new avenues for future research on the importance of human capital in the public sector.
- To get a fuller picture of what contributes to government ineffectiveness, one would also need to go beyond documenting the characteristics of inputs that go into public administration to document the differences in organizational structure in public administrations. We know very little about the latter but it is likely to play a key role in setting incentives and creating a wellfunctioning public sector.
- It would also be useful to build a dataset for lower level officials (e.g. tax collectors) to complement the dataset of this study. Putting everything together, it would then be possible to study how the interplay between human capital at all levels of seniority and the organizational structure of public administrations determines government effectiveness.
