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.
More Data on State Capacity
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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.
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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 DataFull 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 17, 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
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-sector-employment-as-a-share-of-total-employment.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear