UNU-WIDER at UN Behavioural Science Week

This presentation will draw on research from the UNU-WIDER project How do effective states emerge? 

To register and find out more information visit the 2023 UN Behavioural Science Week website.

About

In spite of substantive efforts to strengthen accountability, transparency, and public sector performance, developing-country progress continues to be held up by bureaucratic inefficiency, office holder misconduct or other institutional weaknesses. We report on a lab-in-the-field experiment that shows how behavioural economics can be a powerful tool to understand the institutional constraints to better governance.

Our experiment is an effort to replicate key ingredients of such a real-world institutional environment in a controlled lab setting. We do this to examine how politicians and ordinary citizens respond to institutional incentives. We show how the application of behavioural economics to governance problems can challenge assumptions and the received wisdom about the uniformity of response to and the effectiveness of incentives promoted by public policy.