 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 limit corruption, enforce laws, and foster an environment conducive to private sector development. The data reveal a positive association between quality-adjusted education among civil servants and various dimensions of government effectiveness—that is, when civil servants are better educated, there is less corruption, higher tax collection, better public finance management, and more support for private markets.
Higher educational attainment in public administrations is associated with less corruption in those administrations. Chart 2 shows the cross-correlation between our measure of educational attainment and an indicator of corruption based on data from the International Country Risk Guide (2012). Higher educational attainment in public administrations continues to be associated with less corruption. This finding suggests that a more educated public administration workforce can eventually lead to higher development by helping limit the misuse of public funds and shelter private companies from capture.
Moreover, we found that when civil servants are better educated, countries are able to collect more tax revenue. Revenue mobilization is one of the biggest challenges for developing economies, and higher revenue mobilization should be considered a sign of state capacity and state building for developing countries (Besley and Persson, 2009). The correlation between our measure of educational attainment and tax revenue collected as a percentage of GDP is positive and strong for a large cross section of countries. This finding suggests that better-educated civil servants are more effective at administrating taxes, ensuring compliance, and understanding and enabling private sector development.
Another dimension of government effectiveness is reflected in a state’s ability to support the development, regulation, and supervision of private markets—such as the domestic financial sector, which in turn plays an important role in fostering growth. We found a positive and a statistically and economically significant relati