Publication
How personnel allocation affects performance: Evidence from Brazil's federal protected areas agency
Many government agencies operate with fewer personnel than they need to perform effectively. This paper addresses the gap that explores how agencies might allocate their personnel so as to maximise performance with the personnel they have.
- Author
- Gus Greenstein
- Date
- 30 August 2023
- Links
- Read the full article here
The problem is almost certainly worse in lower-income countries, which tend to generate fewer state resources through tax revenue. Consistent with this prediction, other researchers document a strong positive correlation between country income levels and proportion of the labor force employed in the public sector, using the most comprehensive global data on bureaucracy size assembled to date. Whereas the public sector employs approximately 25% of labor forces in the United States, Western Europe, and Northern Europe, that number is only 11% in South Asia, 10% in Latin America, and 9% in sub-Saharan Africa.
Furthermore this paper shows that quantitative evidence indicates that performance gains from a marginal increase in the number of staff present in an agency sub-unit are likely to be particularly high in sub-units managing larger subjurisdictions and in sub-units facing a higher risk of near-term failure, although evidence is less consistent for the former. Qualitative evidence illustrates mechanisms likely underlying these results. Monitoring and responding to incidents for the most part cannot be performed remotely, and navigating in and around Brazilian PAs is time-consuming. These conditions often prohibit management teams from carrying out monitoring and enforcement tasks with the necessary frequency while diverting attention from other tasks critical to successful management.