Public confidence in Pakistan's bureaucratic effectiveness is at an all-time low. What does research tell us about the incentives, selection, and training needed to improve the current state of civil service?
Editor’s note: This blog is the fifth in a series of posts reflecting on how the evidence from VoxDevLits applies to specific contexts. This post explores how evidence on Bureaucracy relates to Pakistan.
As of 2024, Pakistan ranks 135th (out of 180) on the global Corruption Perceptions Index—a trend that has been worsening since 2018. Domestic polls tell a similar story: in 2022, 86% of Pakistanis perceived corruption to be widespread throughout the government (Pasha and Vigers 2023). Pessimism over the current state of the country has also been steadily increasing, with 48% believing that their living standards are getting worse (Pasha and Vigers 2023). Despite the growing demand to strengthen the administrative capacity of the state, there is less consensus on how.
Research on administrative reform reveals that bureaucratic effectiveness is driven by improvements in incentives, selection, and matching (Xu 2023). Pakistan is no exception; through carefully designed studies of the bureaucracy, researchers are beginning to unpack the complex dynamics underpinning various arms of the public sector.
For instance, in a recent study of Pakistan’s highly selective civil service, Aman-Rana (2025) finds that junior bureaucrats connected to powerful seniors from their early careers tend to progress faster via discretionary promotions than those without connections. However, despite the high corruption and low transparency context, Aman-Rana (2025) finds that these promotion decisions are, in fact, based on merit rather than social ties. Further investigation reveals that promotions reflect the incentives of those in charge, especially the reputational concerns of seniors referring juniors to other bureaucrats. Organisational structures within the agency should thus be redesigned to systematically encourage civil servants to prioritise performance over personal connections.
Evidence on improving civil servants’ performance in…
Healthcare
Public sector absenteeism is a pressing issue in many developing countries, especially among teachers and health workers (Chaudhury et al. 2006)—Pakistan included. In Punjab, Callen et al. (2023) found that government doctors working in rural health clinics were absent during two-thirds of the time. To help mitigate this issue, researchers implemented a monitoring reform in which hospital inspectors were provided smartphones that geocoded and timestamped their activities on a dashboard visible to senior managers, sharpening incentives to monitor clinics and accurately report data.
The results of this intervention were mixed. In politically competitive constituencies, monitoring modestly increased doctor attendance, with more pronounced effects observed among doctors without political ties. The intervention was unable, however, to boost attendance in less politically competitive areas and for doctors with those ties. Such limitations underscore how persistent patronage and political asymmetries pose structural barriers to enhancing public sector performance in Pakistan.
Education
The variation in teacher quality in Pakistan is substantial: the difference between being assigned a teacher in the 5th versus 95th percentile is equivalent to receiving three times the amount of learning during the school year (Bau and Das 2017), emphasising the need for better self-selection into teaching. Brown and Andrabi (2021) evaluates how different compensation contracts impact a school’s ability to attract and retain better teachers. They find that schools benefit greatly from introducing performance pay and/or allowing teachers to choose what type of contract they receive (i.e. a flat or performance-based raise), as higher-quality teachers are more likely to self-select into teaching. Improving teacher selection and compensation hence remains critical for ensuring that schools consistently attract and retain the educators who will drive student success.
Public procurement
Public procurement is an essential government activity that is also highly susceptible to corruption (UNODC n.d.). Pakistan currently spends 20% of GDP on public procurement, emphasising the need for more efficiently designed procurement systems. Contrary to popular belief, the key to efficiency may not lie in stringency.
Instead, Parry et al. (2020) evaluated the impact of providing procurement officers with more autonomy and offering financial incentives on performance. Surprisingly, they found that officers who were given greater autonomy managed to procure goods at a 8-9% lower cost without sacrificing quality, thereby acting in the interests of taxpayers. While the incentives treatment—which rewarded officers for achieving greater value-for-money—was only effective when their monitors did not cause delays.
The success of these treatments depended on the type of monitor each officer was assigned. While the autonomy treatment worked best when monitors were more extractive, the incentives treatment outperformed when monitors were effective. Designing effective incentives therefore requires careful attention to agency conflicts and power dynamics across different levels of bureaucratic hierarchy.
Solving the selection problem
Pakistan’s political class is largely dynastic, with around 33% of elected representatives in the National Assembly being active since the 1990 election cycle (Alam 2024). Given the high severance costs and limited formal incentives in many bureaucracies, selection can be a powerful tool for enhancing the performance of future civil servants (Xu 2023).
From the courts…
Prior to 2010, judicial appointments in Pakistan were made at the discretion of the President. That year, an unprecedented institutional reform transferred this authority to a judicial commission, establishing a peer-based selection process. Mehmood (2021) studies the impact of this reform on pro-government rulings and decision quality, finding that a 10% increase in judicial appointment via this system reduced state wins by 4% by 2019. Substantially, Mehmood (2021) estimates that this reform prevented land expropriations worth 0.14% of GDP every year, saving the country $400 million annually. These gains illustrate the urgency of addressing the selection problem within Pakistan's civil service—even among those entrusted with upholding the law.
…to the council
The act of running for political office in is often associated with self-interest—a perception held by around 81% of Pakistanis (Gulzar and Khan 2024). In a field experiment, Gulzar and Khan (2024) found that emphasising prosocial—rather than personal—motives for seeking political office increased the likelihood of these individuals running for village council by 1.8 percentage points. The budgetary spending of these elected officials is also significantly more aligned with citizen preferences. Encouraging such altruistic motivations thus has the potential to transform who chooses to enter politics and how they govern, especially at the local level.
Does training bureaucrats lead to better decisions?
Efforts to train bureaucrats to govern more effectively have proven promising in Pakistan. For instance, Mehmood et al. (2021a) found that training policymakers in econometrics elevated the importance of quantitative evidence in policymaking by 50%. Treated ministers were also three times more likely to spend public funds to generate evidence in the form of RCTs. Similarly, those trained in the utility of empathy were more likely to exhibit certain altruistic behaviours—such as orphanage visits, blood donations, and the use of more socially cohesive language on social media—by 33% (Mehmood et al. 2021b). These findings demonstrates how well-designed training programmes can meaningfully improve practices and attitudes within the civil service, reinforcing the importance of continuous investment in bureaucratic capacity-building.
Implications for the future of Pakistan’s civil service
Research featured on VoxDev has documented the extent of bureaucratic inefficiency in Pakistan and highlighted policy solutions. The various arms of Pakistan’s public sector must find ways to optimise their organisational processes, with an emphasis on better aligning incentives, selection, and matching/training efforts, as highlighted in the VoxDevLit on Bureaucracy. With a better civil service, Pakistan can expand access to, and improve, public goods and services. It all starts with a better understanding of the dynamics within and between departments.
References
Alam, K (2024), “How Pakistan’s dynastic grip on politics hinders growth of young leaders”, TRT World.
Aman-Rana, S (2025), “Meritocracy in the civil service: Lessons from Pakistan”, VoxDev.
Bau, N, and J Das (2017), “The labour market for teachers in Pakistan: Pay and effectiveness”, VoxDev.
Brown, C, and T Andrabi (2021), “Can performance pay allow schools to attract and retain better teachers? Evidence from Pakistan”, VoxDev.
Callen, M, S Gulzar, A Hasanain, M Y Khan, and A Rezaee (2023), “Public sector absenteeism, politics and patronage in Pakistan”, VoxDev.
Chaudhury, N, J Hammer, M Kremer, K Muralidharan, and F H Rogers (2006), “Missing in action: Teacher and health worker absence in developing countries”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(1): 91–116.
Transparency International (2024), Corruption Perceptions Index.
Gulzar, S, and M Y Khan (2024), “Getting good politicians into politics”, VoxDev.
Mehmood, S (2021), “The impact of presidential appointment of judges: Montesquieu or the federalists?”, VoxDev.
Mehmood, S, S Naseer, and D L Chen (2021a), “Training policymakers in econometrics: Evidence from Pakistan”, VoxDev.
Mehmood, S, S Naseer, and D L Chen (2021b), “Training effective altruism: Experimental evidence from Pakistan”, VoxDev.
Parry, K, O Bandiera, M Best, A Khan, and A Prat (2020), “Autonomy – not rules – may be a government’s best weapon in the fight against corruption”, VoxDev.
Pasha, H, and B Vigers (2023), “Corruption in spotlight as Pakistan's economy spirals”, Gallup.
UNODC (n.d.), Corruption in public procurement.
Xu, G, E Deserranno, D Moreira, and E Teso (2023), “Bureaucracy”, VoxDevLit, 8(1), September.