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Working Paper
Management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kerala through the lens of state capacity and clientelismDuring the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Kerala, a state in southern India, successfully managed to contain the pandemic. As a result, the Kerala model of managing the COVID-19 pandemic was celebrated as a success across the globe...
COVID-19 Pandemic State capacityWorking Paper
Governance and COVID-19 in BoliviaOn 10 March 2020, the Bolivian government identified two COVID-19 cases in Bolivians returning from Italy. The national government responded swiftly and sent the country into one of the world’s strictest lockdowns on 22 March 2020...
Bolivia COVID-19 SubnationalWorking Paper
Pandemic precarity and the complicated case of Maharashtra: Interrogating state capacity and its fault linesThe state of Maharashtra and the city of Mumbai have been referred to as the epidemic epicentre of India since the time of the plague of 1896 and influenza epidemic of 1918...
Pandemic Migrants COVID-19 vaccineJournal Article
Clientelism and governanceTHIS ARTICLE IS PART OF A FORTHCOMING JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE OF WORLD DEVELOPMENT | Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short article contains mainly the author’s general reflections on the broad issues of govern...
vote-buying Clientelism PoliticsWorking Paper
Residual capacity and the political economy of pandemic response in GhanaOn the whole, poor countries in Africa and elsewhere seem to have weathered the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19) pandemic better than wealthier countries with superior healthcare systems...
COVID-19 State capacity ClientelismWorking Paper
COVID-19 and the state: Nicaragua case studyUnlike Latin American peers, and contrary to World Health Organization recommendations, Nicaragua eschewed lockdowns and other common strategies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19...
Nicaragua Authoritarianism LeadershipWorking Paper
The Tanzanian state response to COVID-19: Why low capacity, discursive legitimacy, and twilight authority matterTanzania received significant global attention for its COVID-19 response during the first year of the pandemic...
Tanzania Nationalism State authorityWorking Paper
Donors for tax morale: Evidence from 34 African countriesDo aid projects affect citizens’ motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries...
Foreign aid Tax morale State capacityWorking Paper
No taxation without informational foundation: On the role of legibility in tax state developmentThis paper combines cross-national statistical analysis and in-depth historical case studies of Argentina and Chile to explore the relationship between two crucial dimensions of state capacity...
State capacity Information Fiscal capacityWorking Paper
How clientelism undermines state capacity: Evidence from Mexican municipalitiesDoes clientelism perpetuate the weak state capacity that characterizes many young democracies? Prior work explains that clientelist parties skew public spending to private goods and under-supply public goods...
Clientelism State capacity Bureaucratic capacityBlog
Afghanistan 2021: A quickly made long tragedy
The tragedy for the Afghan people of the Taliban re-taking control of the country in August 2021 is the denouement of a process 20 years in the making...
Problem Driven Iterative Adaption State capacityWorking Paper
Clientelism and governanceUnlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author’s general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that cli...
vote-buying Clientelism PoliticsBlog
Why countries best placed to handle the pandemic appear to have fared the worstDuring the first year of the pandemic, it was wealthier countries, with their comparatively stronger health systems, civil services, legal systems and other public services, that suffered the highest rates of COVID-19...
COVID-19 Pandemic StateWorking Paper
COVID-19 and the stateWe expect effective state institutions to matter in a country’s ability to respond to crises...
COVID-19 Pandemic StateAbout
Sub-national institutional performance across Ghana’s districts and regions – variation and causes
Ghana Institutional performance State capacity Blog
Why should I care about economic growth?
Director of UNU-WIDER, Professor Kunal Sen is a world leading expert in development economics and led on ESID ’s research into economic growth...
Governance State capacity Structural transformation