doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/40411

Person:
Rogger, Daniel

Last updated: January 13, 2025

Biography

Daniel Rogger is a senior economist in the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) Department at the World Bank. He manages the Governance and Institution Building unit of DIME and is colead of the World Bank’s Bureaucracy Lab, a collaboration between DIME and the Governance Global Practice that aims to bridge research and policy to strengthen public administration. His research focuses on the organization of the delivery of public goods. He is a cofounder of the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators, Global Survey of Public Servants, and Microdata and Evidence for Government Action initiatives. He was a PhD scholar at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where he is now an international research fellow. He holds a PhD in economics from University College London.

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Manual de Analítica Gubernamental: Aprovechar los datos para fortalecer la Administración Pública
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-26) Rogger, Daniel; Schuster, Christian
El Manual de Analítica Gubernamental (Government Analytics Handbook) presenta evidencia innovadora e ideas de profesionales sobre cómo aprovechar los datos para fortalecer la administración pública. Abarca una amplia gama de fuentes de microdatos —como datos administrativos y encuestas de empleados públicos—, así como herramientas y recursos para realizar los análisis, para transformar la capacidad de los gobiernos para adoptar un enfoque basado en datos para diagnosticar y mejorar el funcionamiento de las organizaciones públicas. Esta versión ha sido traducida por el Centro Latinoamericano de Administración para el Desarrollo (CLAD) y contiene una selección de siete capítulos que abordan temas fundamentales para América América Latina y el Caribe.
Data for Better Governance: Building Government Analytics Ecosystems in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-25) Santini, Juan Francisco; Sacco Capurro, Flavia; Rogger, Daniel; Lundy, Timothy; Kim, Galileu; de León Miranda, Jorge; Cocciolo, Serena; Casanova, Chiara
Governments in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region face significant developmental and institutional challenges, such as slowing growth, fiscal constraints, and inefficiencies in the public sector. At the same time, governments have invested significantly in government technologies (GovTech), making LAC a global pioneer in management information systems (MISs). This investment creates an opportunity for governments to leverage MIS data to strengthen the functioning of government and achieve development goals—that is, government analytics. This report provides a conceptual framework to assess and provide guidance on the regional government analytics agenda and how to harvest the benefits of GovTech investments. It examines how government analytics can inform policy making and improve accountability and efficiency, drawing on survey data and successful applications of government analytics. The report also explores the enabling conditions for government analytics—data infrastructure and analytical capabilities—and how to strengthen them. Finally, it provides practical guidance on how to develop a holistic government analytics agenda. "Data for Better Governance: Building Government Analytics Ecosystems in Latin America and the Caribbean" is part of the Government Analytics collection, which began with The Government Analytics Handbook (2023). This growing series features frontier evidence and expert insights on how to leverage data to improve government performance.
The Global Survey of Public Servants: A Foundation for Research on Public Servants around the World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-03) Mikkelsen, Kim Sass; Fukuyama, Francis; Hasnain, Zahid; Mistree, Dinsha; Meyer-Sahling, Jan; Bersch, Katherine; Kay, Kerenssa; Rogger, Daniel; Schuster, Christian
How do civil service management practices differ within and across governments? How do core attitudes of public servants—such as their motivation or satisfaction—differ within and across governments? Understanding how public administrations around the world function and differ is crucial for strengthening their effectiveness. Most comparative measures of bureaucracy rely on surveys of experts, households, or firms, rather than directly questioning bureaucrats. Direct surveys of public officials enable governments to benchmark themselves and scholars to study comparative public administration and the state differently, based on micro-data from actors who experience government first-hand. This paper introduces the Global Survey of Public Servants, a global initiative to collect and harmonize large-scale, comparable survey data on public servants. The Global Survey of Public Servants can help scholars compare public administrations around the world and understand the internal dynamics of governments, with the published Global Survey of Public Servants data freely available online.
Public Service Reform in Post-Conflict Societies
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-12-24) Blum, Jurgen Rene; Rogger, Daniel
Building a capable public service is a key component of post-conflict state building. An effective public service is fundamental to the regulation of society, to managing public funds, and to service delivery. Yet in post-conflict environments, there is typically a tradeoff between the long-term objective of state building and securing the peace in the short term. To buy peace, political elites hand out public jobs and resources to constituents regardless of merit. Donors frequently rely on “parallel” project delivery structures rather than public servants to address citizens’ pressing service delivery needs. Both of these practices may achieve short-term objectives but undermine state building. In the face of these trade-offs, how can capable public services be built in post-conflict societies? This paper aims to summarize the evidence base regarding this question. It does so by reviewing the evidence from post-conflict settings, and by discussing the validity of findings on public service reform from non-conflict settings. Given the distinctive tradeoffs invoked by securing the peace, and limited prior research on post-conflict settings, this topic presents a wide-open research agenda.
The Consequences of Political Interference in Bureaucratic Decision Making: Evidence from Nigeria
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08) Rogger, Daniel
This paper investigates the consequences of granting politicians power over bureaucrats in the implementation of small-scale public infrastructure projects. While potentially bolstering the incentive for the executive to perform, increased legislative oversight may lead to distortions in the technocratic process for political gain. By assembling a nationally representative data set from Nigeria that tracks public projects from inception to audit, the paper finds evidence of a clear trade-off between political oversight and bureaucratic autonomy. Using an instrumental variables strategy in which early career choices of politicians are key determinants of legislative committee membership, the analysis finds that legislative influence increases the likelihood that a project is launched by 18 percent, but at the cost of reducing project quality by 15 percent and increasing the reported misuse of funds. The results highlight the fundamental tension between bureaucratic inaction and political corruption.
Hierarchy and Information
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11) Somani, Ravi; Rogger, Daniel
What determines the distribution of information acquired within the hierarchy of a public organization? Without market processes, the generation and absorption of information in bureaucracy relies on individual actors undertaking costly action to acquire it. This paper reports on comparisons between individual-level claims by public officials in the Government of Ethiopia regarding the characteristics of local constituents they serve and objective benchmark data. Public officials make large errors about their constituents' characteristics. The errors of 49 percent of public officials are at least 50 percent of the underlying benchmark data. Given public officials' stated reliance on this information to make public policy decisions, such mistakes imply a substantial misallocation of public resources. The results are consistent with classic theoretical predictions related to the incentives that determine information acquisition in hierarchies, such as de facto control over decision making and an organizational culture of valuing operational information. A field experiment implies that these incentives mediate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving the information of public-sector agents.
Management and Bureaucratic Effectiveness: Evidence from the Ghanaian Civil Service
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-09) Rasul, Imran; Williams, Martin J.; Rogger, Daniel
A burgeoning area of social science research examines how state capabilities and bureaucratic effectiveness shape economic development. This paper studies how the management practices of civil service bureaucrats correlate to the delivery of public projects, using novel data from the Ghanaian Civil Service. This paper combines hand-coded progress reports on 3,600 projects with a management survey in the government ministries and departments responsible for these projects. The analysis finds that management matters: practices related to autonomy are positively associated with project completion, yet practices related to incentives/monitoring of bureaucrats are negatively associated with project completion. The negative impact of incentives/monitoring practices is partly explained by bureaucrats having to multi-task, interactions with their intrinsic motivation, their engagement in influence activities, and project characteristics such as the clarity of targets and deliverable outputs. The paper discusses the interplay between management practices and corruption, alternative methods by which to measure management practices in organizations, and the external validity of the results. The findings suggest that the focus of many civil service reform programs on introducing stronger incentives and monitoring may backfire in some organizations, and that even countries with low levels of state capability may benefit by providing public servants with greater autonomy in some spheres.
Who Serves the Poor?: Surveying Civil Servants in the Developing World
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05) Rogger, Daniel
Who are the civil servants that serve poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct surveys of civil servants -- the professional body of administrators who manage government policy -- and their organizations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, to highlight key aspects of their characteristics and experience of civil service life. Civil servants in the developing world face myriad challenges to serving the world's poor, from limited facilities to significant political interference in their work. There are a number of commonalities across service environments, and the paper summarizes these in a series of 'stylized facts' of the civil service in the developing world. At the same time, the particular challenges faced by a public official vary substantially across and within countries and regions. For example, measured management practices differ widely across local governments of a single state in Nigeria. Surveys of civil servants allow us to document these differences, build better models of the public sector, and make more informed policy choices.
The Impact of Ethnic Diversity in Bureaucracies: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service
(American Economic Association, 2015-05) Rasul, Imran; Rogger, Daniel
The authors document the correlation between the workplace diversity in bureaucratic organizations and public service delivery, in the context of Nigeria, where ethnicity is a salient form of self-identity. This article expands the empirical management literature highlighting beneficial effects of workplace diversity, that has focused on private sector firms operating in high-income settings. The analysis combines two data sources: (i) a survey to over 4,000 bureaucrats eliciting their ethnic identities; (ii) independent engineering assessments of completion rates for 4,700 public sector projects. The ethnic diversity of bureaucracies matters positively: a one standard deviation increase in the ethnic diversity of bureaucrats corresponds to 9 percent higher completion rates. In line with the management literature from private sector firms in high-income countries, this evidence highlights a potentially positive side of ethnic diversity in public sector organizations, in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa.