Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo

What you should know about this indicator

  • The public sector covers core public administration at the central, regional, and local levels of government, the security sector (including the armed forces), public education and healthcare workers, and public institutions such as central banks and state-owned enterprises.
  • The indicator counts paid public sector employees relative to all employed people, including the self-employed, employers, and unpaid family workers. In countries where self-employment is widespread — as in much of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa — it is therefore much lower than the public sector's share of paid employees, which the dataset reports separately.
  • Estimates are calculated by the World Bank from harmonized, nationally representative household and labor force surveys, in which respondents report the sector of their main job. Employment definitions follow the International Labour Organization's classification, making the data broadly comparable with ILO statistics.
  • For countries in the European Economic Area between 2004 and 2018, the public sector is approximated using industry classifications covering public administration, education, and health. This approximation excludes state-owned enterprises and can include some private education and health workers.
  • Survey availability differs across countries, so the most recent data point can refer to different years in different countries.

How is this data described by its producer - World Bank?

The proportion of public sector workers out of total employment.

Source: World Bank staff calculations based on the methodology described in World Bank (2023). https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099062623201028153/p1687031c943fa1313f6814bcf1aeb51371a5665a9ac

Public sector employment as a share of total employment
World Bank
The share of all employed people who are paid employees of the public sector, including government, the armed forces, public services, and state-owned enterprises.
Source
World Bank (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 14, 2026
Next expected update
July 2027
Date range
2000–2022
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

World Bank – Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI)

The Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI) database is a unique cross-national dataset on public sector employment and wages that aims to fill an information gap, thereby helping researchers, development practitioners, and policymakers gain a better understanding of the personnel dimensions of state capability, the footprint of the public sector within the overall labor market, and the fiscal implications of the public sector wage bill. The dataset is derived from administrative data and household surveys, thereby complementing existing, expert perception-based approaches.

The WWBI includes 302 indicators that are estimated from microdata drawn from the labor force and household surveys and augmented with administrative data for 202 economies in five categories: the demographics of the private and public sector workforces; public sector wage premiums; relative wages and pay compression ratios, gender pay gaps; and the public sector wage bill. The micro and administrative data utilized in the construction of the WWBI are drawn from data catalogs housing surveys conducted by national statistical organizations (NSO) or multilateral organization data teams. Together, these provide an important, albeit narrow, picture of the skills and incentives of bureaucrats. Indicators on public employment track key demographic characteristics including the size of the public sector workforce (in absolute and relative numbers), their age, and distributions across genders, industries, occupations, income quintiles, and academic qualifications. Variables on compensation capture both the competitiveness of public sector wages (compared to the private sector) as well as wage differentials across industry or occupation of employment, genders, education, and income quintiles within the public and private sectors as well as pay compression ratios in public and private sectors. The indicators on the size of the wage bill offer a glimpse into the structure and affordability of the public sector within the larger economy.

Retrieved on
July 14, 2026
Retrieved from
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038132/worldwide-bureaucracy-indicators
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Bank. 2025. Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators version 6.0.

The Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI) database is a unique cross-national dataset on public sector employment and wages that aims to fill an information gap, thereby helping researchers, development practitioners, and policymakers gain a better understanding of the personnel dimensions of state capability, the footprint of the public sector within the overall labor market, and the fiscal implications of the public sector wage bill. The dataset is derived from administrative data and household surveys, thereby complementing existing, expert perception-based approaches.

The WWBI includes 302 indicators that are estimated from microdata drawn from the labor force and household surveys and augmented with administrative data for 202 economies in five categories: the demographics of the private and public sector workforces; public sector wage premiums; relative wages and pay compression ratios, gender pay gaps; and the public sector wage bill. The micro and administrative data utilized in the construction of the WWBI are drawn from data catalogs housing surveys conducted by national statistical organizations (NSO) or multilateral organization data teams. Together, these provide an important, albeit narrow, picture of the skills and incentives of bureaucrats. Indicators on public employment track key demographic characteristics including the size of the public sector workforce (in absolute and relative numbers), their age, and distributions across genders, industries, occupations, income quintiles, and academic qualifications. Variables on compensation capture both the competitiveness of public sector wages (compared to the private sector) as well as wage differentials across industry or occupation of employment, genders, education, and income quintiles within the public and private sectors as well as pay compression ratios in public and private sectors. The indicators on the size of the wage bill offer a glimpse into the structure and affordability of the public sector within the larger economy.

Retrieved on
July 14, 2026
Retrieved from
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038132/worldwide-bureaucracy-indicators
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
World Bank. 2025. Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators version 6.0.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Public sector employment as a share of total employment”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “State Capacity”. Data adapted from World Bank. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260715-083723/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.html [online resource] (archived on July 15, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

World Bank (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

World Bank (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Public sector employment as a share of total employment – World Bank” [dataset]. World Bank, “Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI) Version 6” [original data]. Retrieved July 15, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260715-083723/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.html (archived on July 15, 2026).

Download

Quick download

You can download the visualization as an image or download the chart data.