Here is a one-page instruction manual for managing an effective public service. It is based on a recent World Bank Policy Research Working paper by Imran Rasul, Martin Williams and myself.
In both Ghana and Nigeria, we found very similar results on the optimal management practices to use in government administration. Surprisingly similar. Autonomy is good in almost all situations. Performance incentives are distortionary in many. The results are highly consistent with a wider literature on bureaucratic autonomy (see here and here for recent examples). So on from my first comic strip abstract, and Dave Evans great blog on how to communicate your research, here is a six panel attempt to distill the main message of our papers as a comic strip.
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