Introducing the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators: A New Global Dataset on Public Sector Employment and Compensation

Abstract

Abstract The public sector employs roughly a third of the world's paid workforce. Their wages not only represent the income of a substantial portion of the population but also influence pay setting across the rest of the economy. However, global data on employment and compensation within the public sector, and how these compare to the private sector, has been limited to date. This paper describes a novel dataset produced by the World Bank's “Bureaucracy Lab” attempting to fill this gap. The “Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators” (WWBI) are compiled from over 53 million unique observations and consist of 63,282 individual observations across 92 variables of the characteristics of public‐sector employment, compensation, and the overall wage bill for 132 countries between 2000 and 2018. The indicators, constructed from nationally representative household surveys, present a micro‐founded picture of public sector labor markets across the world.