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Interactive May 31, 2023

Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators Dashboard

The Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI) are a unique cross-national dataset on public sector employment and wages developed by the World Bank's `Bureaucracy Lab'. They aim to help researchers, development practitioners, and policymakers gain a better understanding of the personnel dimensions of state capability, the footprint of the public sector within the overall labor market, and the fiscal implications of the public sector wage bill. The indicators, constructed from nationally representative household surveys, present a micro-founded picture of public sector labor markets across the world. The WWBI are based on 53 million unique survey observations and consist of 112,919 estimations across 192 indicators for 202 countries and territories between 2000 and 2018.

 The data visualization dashboard presents data from the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators in different figures for viewing and exporting into PDF, PPT, and Crosstab formats.

  • Explore tab: Analyzes individual indicators across multiple countries and time.
  • Country Snapshot: Presents a one-click snapshot for the main indicators for each country as well as important regional and global comparators.
  • Sectoral snapshot: Presents data for education and healthcare sectors for each country as well as important regional and global comparators.
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What are the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators?

The WWBI has allowed for rigorous inquiry into the public sector workforce producing some first-of-their-kind stylized facts. It provides answer to some of the most important questions on the appropriate level and distribution of employment in the public sector, the equity, transparency, and market competitiveness of public sector wages and their impact on service delivery and human capital outcomes.

The WWBI provides fine-grain indicators in five categories: the demographics of the private and public sector workforces; public sector wage premiums; relative wages and pay compression ratios, gender pay gaps, and the public sector wage bill. A few key indicators:

  • Size of the public and private sector workforce;
  • Demographics of public and private sector employment: distributions by gender, age, education, urban-rural, wage quintiles, and industry of employment;
  • Gender equity in public and private sectors;
  • Public sector wage premiums;
  • Distributions of public sector wage premiums by education, occupation, industry, and gender;
  • Gender wage gaps in the public and private sectors;
  • Pay compression ratios in public and private sectors (ratio of 90th and 10th percentile wage earners);
  • Relative pay ratios in the public and private sector (indexed occupations);
  • Employee benefits in the public and private sectors;
  • The relative size of the public sector wage bill;

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