Publication: Wages and Health Worker Retention in Ghana : Evidence from Public Sector Wage Reforms
Date
2012-02
ISSN
Published
2012-02
Author(s)
Antwi, James
Phillips, David
Abstract
Can governments in developing countries
retain skilled health workers by raising public sector
wages? The author investigates this question using sudden,
policy-induced wage variation, in which the Government of
Ghana restructured the pay scale for government health
workers. The author find that a ten percent increase in
wages decreases annual attrition from the public payroll by
1.5 percentage points (from a mean of eight percentage
points) among 20-35 year-old workers from professions that
tend to migrate. As a result, the ten-year survival
probability for these health workers increases from 0.43 to
0.52. The effects are concentrated among these young
workers, and we do not detect effects among older workers or
among categories of workers that do not tend to migrate.
Given Ghana's context as a major source of skilled
health professional migrants and high correlation of our
attrition measure with aggregate migration, the author
interpret these results as evidence that wage increases in
Ghana improve retention mainly through reducing
international migration.
Citation
“Antwi, James; Phillips, David. 2012. Wages and Health Worker Retention in Ghana : Evidence from Public Sector Wage Reforms. Health, Nutrition and Population (HNP)
discussion paper;. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/0e748228-1d87-53e2-b1da-0a1c7ba9cd2f License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”