Public Sector Wage Bill

Public sector wage bill (% of GDP)·Neither end is better — this is a shape, not a score·Published by World Bank Group

We hold 23 editions of this indicator, from 2000 to 2022 — 4,019 rows in total, and 168 countries in the newest.

23 reference years (2000–2022), covering 151 to 184 countries, from the World Bank's Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (BI.WAG.TOTL.GD.ZS). What a country pays its public employees, as a share of the whole economy. It measures the MACHINERY of the state, where the governance indices already on the site measure perceptions of it. ⚠ NEITHER END IS BETTER: a large wage bill is an expensive state, or one that delivers health and education through its own staff rather than buying them in; a small one is lean government, or a country that cannot pay for teachers. Nothing in the number says which. ⚠ IT IS PAY, NOT HEADCOUNT — a country can employ few people expensively or many people cheaply and land in the same place, which is why public sector employment is a separate indicator here. ⚠ The WBI has no page in the World Development Indicators and does not turn up by searching for "bureaucracy"; it was found by pulling the indicator API's whole 25,000-row catalogue and grepping it. No rank is published, so none is stored; the POSITION is derived here and labelled as ours.