World Bank and IMF:

Pay and Benefits Compared With Those of Other Organizations

NSIAD-95-177BR: Published: Jul 17, 1995. Publicly Released: Jul 17, 1995.

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Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the salaries and benefits of World Bank and International Monetary Fund employees, focusing on the: (1) system used to determine Bank and Fund pay and benefit levels; (2) salaries and benefits of employees in comparable positions in the public and private sector in member countries and the international sector; and (3) role of compensation in staff recruitment and retention.

GAO found that: (1) the system used by the Bank and the Fund for determining compensation gives the civil service some consideration but relies most heavily on prevailing practices in large private companies in the United States, Germany, and France; (2) to enable the two institutions to compete for the highest quality employees from all member countries, the system generates relatively high rates of pay, and benefits commensurate with average levels in the surveyed markets; (3) excluding salaries of highest level management, the average net-of-tax salary among Bank and Fund professionals is about $86,000; (4) by design, Bank and Fund pay rates are approximately equal to the seventy-fifth percentile level (P75) for comparable positions in the U.S. market and are higher than overall European P75 levels; (5) however, they do not provide the desired margin over pay levels in European private sector organizations; (6) they exceed the pay rates in the public sector in all surveyed markets, as well as in the United Nations; (7) other international organizations, however, provide compensation that is comparable to that provided by the Bank and the Fund; (8) benefits are generally commensurate with those available to employees in comparator organizations in the three surveyed countries and the international sector; (9) overall, the Bank and the Fund are able to recruit and retain staff with only modest difficulty; and (10) problems center on recruiting staff in certain highly paid professions and from certain high-salary member countries that are currently underrepresented in the two institutions' workforces.

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