There has been considerable comment recently both on the level of civil service salaries (usually to the effect that they are 'too high' and should be reduced) and on examples of allegedly 'wasteful' spending by government departments.
My experience of Hong Kong's civil service over nearly 10 years, with the Immigration, Inland Revenue and Vehicle Licensing (and others) departments has always been that the staff are efficient, helpful, professional and courteous.
Aside from being more pleasant, dealing with efficient civil servants as opposed to, say, British ones, has direct economic benefits, for example, in terms of time savings, on the productivity of those individuals and businesses involved.
I have recently seen a number of examples where significant improvements have been made by incurring relatively little expenditure, for example, in pedestrian and traffic flow in the Causeway Bay area, by simple expedients such as changing lane markings or adding a pedestrian crossing. While there may be examples of expenditure which, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, seem unjustified, there are many examples of creative and positive thinking which benefit everyone, albeit in subtle and less obvious ways. Perhaps people take these for granted.
Has anyone actually benchmarked civil servants' pay against the private sector in order to be able to state empirically that the pay levels are too high?
If they have, I wonder whether the favourable impact on productivity and quality of life both of those dealing directly with departments and of the public at large has been taken into account.
