Tailoring Civil Service Pay Analysis and Advice to Context, Challenges, Approaches, and the Case of Lao PDR
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Authors
Barma, Naazneen H.
Orac, Jana
Subjects
Civil service reform
compensation analysis
public sector wage bill
Lao People’s Democratic Republic
compensation analysis
public sector wage bill
Lao People’s Democratic Republic
Advisors
Date of Issue
2014-01
Date
Publisher
The World Bank
Language
en_US
Abstract
The adequacy of compensation for government workers
and the affordability of the public sector wage bill are
important concerns for many developing countries.
Suitable pay is considered a necessary—albeit far from
sufficient—condition for attracting and retaining
skilled public sector staff. This paper makes the
case for conducting fine-grained analysis of pay and
compensation issues in order to enable an accurate
assessment of the challenges faced and thereby to
generate good-fit reform recommendations that are
both principled and feasible. The first part of the paper
focuses on prevalent challenges in pay reform, both
contextual and analytical. It builds on the experiences
from three very different settings: Armenia, the Lao
People’s Democratic Republic, and Mongolia. The study begins by surveying some of the common difficulties
in conducting granular analysis on civil service
compensation. It then outlines a series of methodological
approaches that can prove useful in developing
comprehensive, targeted, and nuanced pay analyses
and discusses how it is possible to overcome potential
limitations in practice. The second half of the paper
presents a case study of pay and compensation analysis in
Lao PDR. The study illuminates how a number of these
approaches can be combined in assessing a specific set of
pay challenges and generating robust recommendations
tailored to context. A brief postscript, with the benefit of
hindsight on what subsequently happened on the ground
in Lao PDR, reflects on the limitations of technical
analysis in motivating reform implementation in practice.
Type
Book
Description
The World Bank Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, Public Sector Governance Unit, Policy Research Working Paper 6744
Series/Report No
Department
National Security Affairs (NSA)
Organization
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funding
Format
Citation
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.