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Or if instead of Nigeria you want more “civilized” examples, look no further than Eastern European governments. Here in Croatia some years ago a statistic came out that we have 4 times more government employees than Germany. Just for comparison: Germany has 83M people, Croatia little less than 4M. I shudder to think about that metric now as I’m sure its even worse.

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The respective population numbers are irrelevant, because those “four time more” government employees must already be in terms relative to population size – so that's already taken into account.

(Just think about it: Surely Germany has more than a million government employees? If Croatia had over four times that in absolute terms, more than its entire population would work for the government.)

Yeah, that's fair. Thanks for pointing it out.

In fact, counting federal, state and local governments, Germany has some 6 million government employees (~4.8m directly and ~1.2m in public agencies). Also, there might be things that are government provided in one country and private in another (postal service, telcom and utilities, railway, schools, childcare...), which you would need to account for as well.

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