Public sector employment as a share of total employment

The Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI) is a dataset on public sector employment and wages that can help researchers and development practitioners gain a better understanding of the personnel dimensions of state capability, the footprint of the public sector on the overall labor market, and the fiscal implications of the government wage bill. The WWBI aim to fill the gap in information on the personnel of the state by providing more objective measures drawing on administrative data and household surveys, thereby complementing existing, expert perception-based approaches. The WWBI dataset encompass three categories of variables: the characteristics of public employment, wages, and the wage bill. These variables provide an important, though narrow, picture of the skills and incentives of bureaucrats. The characteristics of public employment include the number of public employees, their age, gender distributions, and academic qualifications.

The WWBI data are drawn mainly from primary sources: The World Bank??�s International Income Distribution Database (I2D2), The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and The International Comparisons Program (ICP) wage survey. The I2D2 harmonizes nationally representative household surveys??�both welfare and labor force surveys??�from around the world, presenting data using the same variables and coding in each country and survey. The datasets contain household and individual data on demographics, employment and wages. The LIS is also an income database of harmonized microdata from household surveys from mostly high-income countries, much like the I2D2. The ICP is a global statistical partnership that calculates Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) prices based on detailed comparative price data, including government wages for a standard set of occupations, and GDP expenditure values in 199 countries. The WWBI also capture some data from secondary sources, namely the International Monetary Fund??�s (IMF) new dataset on the wage bill. Thus, across these different data sets we aim to use definitions that correspond most closely to that of the public sector and general government.

This dataset is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/public-licenses#cc-by