Each
edition of the newsletter will set out some developments in country or
region, or on a thematic issue. This first edition offers a few emerging
issues in relation to measuring the dimensions of the public sector -
counting employees, measuring the cost of the wage bill, measuring individual
rewards, and defining the civil service. The approaches described have
a wide but by no means universal acceptance. Please feel free to question
or challenge the definitions and to propose alternatives by responding
to civilservice_mail@worldbank.org.
Measuring
public sector employment and wages is particularly difficult because of
uncertain and often conflicting terminology. A new cross-national database
of government employment and wages should be available shortly at: http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/development.htm.
These data,
developed by Amit Mukherjee and Giulio de Tommaso in the World Bank, rest
on a series of employment classifications - each of which is defined in
objective terms:
- Total
Public Employment
- State-Owned
Enterprise (SOE) employees
- General
Government: comprising six mutually exclusive categories
- Armed
Forces
- Civilian
Central Government
- Subnational
Government (excluding education, health, and police)
- Health
employees
- Education
employees
- Police
Details of
these classifications are provided at http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/cross.htm#1.
Commentsand suggestions welcome.
The approach
set out at http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/cross.htm#3
provides a standard approach to measuring the wage bill, and raises some
questions about the treatment of monetary and non-monetary allowances.
It also raises the question of how vertical compression ratios are used,
and whether the ratio of the highest salary to the lowest on the central
government's main salary scale is adequate. The OECD measures wage compression
in OECD countries as the mean of ninth decile salaries divided by the
mean of first decile salaries. The OECD's approach ensures that a handful
of salaries will not dramatically skew the compression ratio. However,
all compression ratio approaches can be misleading if there are significant
monetary allowances not captured in the calculations, or if the perceived
value of non-monetary rewards represents a significant proportion of total
rewards.
A comprehensive
view of total rewards, reflecting the reality that base pay is only one
part of monetary rewards - and a modest part of the total rewards offered
to civil servants - has long been a priority for those working in the
field. New material at: http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/agency.htm#incentives
set out a 9 point classification that is gaining acceptance as an objective
classification of the elements of total rewards.
Finally,
the thorny issue of who is a civil servant within the larger category
of public employees has been revisited recently. Some definitions and
some new data on the parameters of the civil service within the public
sector in the OECD and in some EU accession countries is set out on http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/civilservice/civilservicelaw.htm.
We look forward
to some debate on the challenges and alternatives in measuring public
employment. Please respond to civilservice_mail@worldbank.org.
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