ter for economic growth (Jones and Olken, 2005; Besley, Montalvo, and Reynal-Querol, 2011). But while leaders set the tone and direction of government, they do not run it.
We focused on the next level down, looking at the quality of education of public servants—those officials who influence policy design and implementation on a day-to-day basis. We found that higher educational attainment among civil servants is associated with higher state governing capacity, resulting in better decisions and, ultimately, better development outcomes. We were able to measure educational attainment by assembling a unique database from the curricula vitae (CVs) of more than 100,000 civil servants who applied to the IMF for economics training over the past three decades (see Box 2).
By documenting the differences in the quality of public servants’ education among countries, we should gain additional insight into why economies develop along different paths. We also further explore why some countries end up with a higher-quality civil service and argue that the adoption of merit-based compensation in public administrations can help attract well-educated individuals.
An educated civil service
The more than 100,000 applicants to the IMF were mid-level civil servants in central banks and ministries of finance and economy. Using the data from their CVs we were able to explore the association between the quality of education and various dimensions of state capacity—the ability of governments to deliver public services, spend on public goods, and collect taxes. Although data on educational attainment are available for the general population, they are not available for public administrations. In fact, we know so little about the characteristics of public administrations that even information on the number of civil servants is not consistently available across countries, let alone over time. This database attempts to fill the gap by building a novel data set on educational attainment in public administrations—albeit only those in the economic and financial sphere.
The data set is comprehensive in the sense that it covers a wide range of age groups and levels of seniority as well as both men and women. However, the degree to which individuals who work in central banks and ministries of finance and economy are representative of overall public administration is difficult to ascertain. Nonetheless, we believe we do make an important contribution by shedding light on an area for which so little systematic documentation is available. Using this data set, we discovered that educational achievement in public administrations across regions is quite different from that of the general population. The general population in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa has, on average, a low level of educational attainment, but a high proportion of civil servants in those regions have college degrees.
We constructed a quality-adjusted measure of educational attainment by computing a weighted average of officials’ years of education. We used as weights a countrywide academic ranking from Universitas, a global network of universities (see Box 3). According to this overall ranking of 48 countries, the United States ranks first, the United Kingdom second, Canada third, and so on—to Indonesia, which ranks 48th. When we consider where the civil servants obtained their degrees, we find that, outside advanced economies, east Asia and central and eastern Europe have the largest share of officials who studied in one of the top 48 countries ranked according to academic standards. Using our quality-adjusted measure of education, we found higher-quality civil services in countries with more economic growth (see Chart 1). This positive association also holds when we control for initial GDP per capita to capture the fact that it is easier for countries to grow fast when they are catching up.
Education and government effectiveness
Government effectiveness is essential to economic development. After all, the prospect of economic development is remote in countries where governments fail to