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...
Research Brief
The Unintended Consequences of Foreign Aid in Tanzania
Tanzania has been a relative success story in terms of African political reform. In the early 1990s Tanzania shifted from a one-party to a multiparty system, allowed greater freedoms for the press and civil society, and in 1995 held its first...
Research Brief
Democracy in Benin
President Yayi Boni of Benin was one of the eight African leaders invited to attended the May 2012 G8 summit at Camp David to discuss the issue of food security. This is perhaps an indication that the country is doing something right, at least from...
Research Brief
Africa’s Democratic Trajectory
Development aid was effective in promoting democratic transitions during the 1990s in African countries beset by economic crisis domestic discontent, and a high dependency on aid. Development aid also influenced democratic transition indirectly...
Research Brief
Zambia – Foreign Aid and Democratic Consolidation
Democracy assistance and donor support have been key in fostering a new type of civil society, dominated by NGOs, the legal community and churches. The bulk of donor funding to Zambia is channelled to the executive through budget support, this has...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid in Africa
How does aid impact democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on existing literature, this study elaborates on the various channels, direct and indirect, through which development and democracy aid has influenced transitions to multi-party regimes and...
Working Paper
Donor Assistance and Political Reform in Tanzania
Tanzania has been a relative success story in Africa in terms of political reform. While foreign aid has helped strengthen institutions that advance accountability, it simultaneously supports a status quo that undermines accountability and...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid and Democratic Consolidation in Zambia
The study examines Zambia’s evolving aid relationship in relation to the country’s democratic trajectory. The impact of aid in terms of democratic consolidation is linked to the development of the party system, the efficacy of key democratic...
Working Paper
Beyond Electoral Democracy
In the 1990s, analysts were almost unanimous in considering Benin to be one of the most important aid recipients among the newly democratizing African countries. After more than two decades of democratic practice, the country has clearly completed...
Working Paper
Patterns of Rent-Extraction and Deployment in Developing Countries
Rents tend to be relatively high in developing countries and also very fungible, so that differences in the scale of the rent and in its distribution among economic agents profoundly affect the nature of the political state and the development...
Working Paper
Measuring Government Performance in Public Opinion Surveys in Africa
In examining the study of government performance, this paper asks whether field experiments can improve the explanatory precision of results generated by public opinion surveys. Survey research on basic health and education services sub-Saharan...