Journal Article
Anti-corruption policy making, discretionary power and institutional quality
We analyse policymakers’ incentives to fight corruption under different institutional qualities. We find that ‘public officials’, even when non-corrupt, significantly distort anti-corruption institutions by choosing a lower detection probability when...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid and the Failure of State Building in Haiti Under the Duvaliers, Aristide, Préval, and Martelly
After receiving at least US$20 billion in aid for reconstruction and development over the past 60 years, Haiti has been and remains a fragile state, one of the worse globally. The reasons for aid failure are legion but mostly relate to highly...
Working Paper
Can One Retell a Mozambican Reform Story Through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation?
Many public sector reforms in developing countries fail to make governments more functional. This is typically because reforms introduce new solutions that do not fit the contexts in which they are being placed. This situation reflects what has...
Working Paper
Overcoming the Limits of Institutional Reform in Uganda
This paper begins by noting that Uganda has been a public sector reform leader in Africa. It has pursued reforms actively and consistently for three decades now, and has produced many laws, processes and structures that are ‘best in class’ in Africa...
Working Paper
Monitoring and Evaluation Reform under Changing Aid Modalities
This paper grew out of our bewilderment with the insouciance with which some in the donor community seem ready to abandon accounting for the use of aid. If one listens to the rhetoric surrounding the new approach to aid, one gets the impression that...
Working Paper
Reconstruction from Breakdown in Northeastern India
The northeast region of India remains fraught with severe violence, poor growth and acute frustration among its youth. Success of policies to resolve the region’s crisis has proved less than encouraging. What could be the way out of the violence–poor...
Working Paper
The Rule of Law, Legal Traditions, and Economic Growth in East Asia
This paper examines the literature on the rule of law and economic development, and in particular the influential argument by La Porta et al., on the superiority of the Anglo-American common law system in fostering financial development. In this...
Working Paper
Aid and Rent-Driven Growth
This paper conceptualises foreign aid as a geopolitical form of rent in order to help distinguish the conditions under which aid is detrimental to sustained economic recovery from those where it is beneficial. Foreign aid shares with natural resource...
Working Paper
Enforcing the Right to Food in India
Over the past decade, a series of events in India have brought the question of food security into sharp focus. Vast famine-affected areas versus surplus production and stocks of grains, the impact of globalization and World Trade Organization laws on...
Working Paper
Realizing the Right to Food in South Asia
Basic human rights recognize the intrinsic value of freedom, only not for the value of freedom itself, but also for its instrumental role enabling an individual to choose a bundle of commodities and wellbeing. The role of food, a basic necessity of...
Working Paper
Bilateral Donors' Aid Allocation Decisions
The present paper adds to the already large existing literature on aid distribution as it runs an equation on bilateral aid allocation on a very rich dataset, covering 20 years (1980-99), 22 donors and 137 recipients, which permits a three...
Working Paper
Privatization and Economic Strategy in Mozambique
Privatization, together with liberalization and deregulation, constituted the core of Mozambique's economic transition. Privatization in Mozambique has taken place on an unusually large scale in comparison with the rest of Africa. Privatization...
Working Paper
Poverty-Reducing Institutional Change and PRSP Processes
This paper assesses the preparation of Ghana’s Poverty Reduction Strategy paper (GPRS), paying particular attention to its likely influence on the institutionalisation of anti-poverty measures in the country’s political economy. After examining...
Working Paper
Anti-corruption policy-making, discretionary power, and institutional quality
We analyse policy makers’ incentives to fight corruption under different institutional qualities. We find that ‘public officials’, even when non-corrupt, significantly distort anti-corruption institutions by choosing a lower detection probability...
Working Paper
Analyzing Corruption Possibilities in the Gaze of the Media
In this paper I analyze the economic incentives that govern the strategic relationship between the government and the independent media using a consistent analytical framework. The analysis focuses on the extent to which the ‘free’ press can act as a...
Working Paper
Governance and Policy in Africa
The recent emphasis on governance in Africa is unique in that it was initiated by donors and not by domestic leaders under pressure from their own constituencies. Thus while many countries have embraced the market economy and liberalized their...
Working Paper
Reform of the Malawian Public Sector
Since the early 1990s, Malawi has tried to undertake economic reforms, including the restructuring of the public sector, even as it embraced democratic reforms. Paucity of human and financial resources has made the process difficult and drawn out...
Working Paper
Botswana as a Role Model for Country Success
I argue that the economic success of Botswana can be explained by the historical development of its institutions which is related to the trajectory of the Tswana states over the past 200 years. These institutions created a much more stable and...