Employment and Wages in the Public Sector: A Cross-Country Study

International Monetary Fund

No 1995/070, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: We study the determinants of employment and wages in the public sector, using a new set of panel data for 34 LDCs and 21 OECD countries from 1972–992, by estimating equations suggested by an efficiency wage model. We find that government employment is positively associated with the relaxation of resource constraints (the revenue-to-GDP ratio and foreign financing in the case of developing countries and GDP per capita in the case of OECD countries), urbanization, the level of education, and certain countercyclical pressures for government hiring (the real effective exchange rate for developing countries and private employment for OECD countries). Certain measures of government wages are positively associated with government revenues and negatively associated with the level of education, government debt, and countercyclical pressures.

Keywords: WP; government employment; private sector; central government; OECD country; real GDP; wage bill; government employment objective; bill equation; General government employment wage; Public employment; Wages; Public sector wages; Employment; Civil service; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52
Date: 1995-07-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=1286 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:1995/070

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().