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Publications (17)
Working Paper
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While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic crises to assess what we can learn from the long...
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– Evidence from a field experiment in India
Does information dissemination among beneficiaries of welfare programmes mitigate their implementation failures? We present experimental evidence in the context of a rural public works programme in India, where we assess the impact of an intervention that involves dissemination of publicly available...
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While the effects of corruption on bilateral trade have been relatively well explored, its effect on the composition of trading partners has not been studied. In this paper, we argue that corruption in a country is likely to impose asymmetric costs on its trading partners depending on their...
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– Assessing the relative effectiveness of egalitarian governance and healthcare system capacity on the COVID-19 pandemic
Scholars of public health typically focus on societal equity for explaining public health outcomes. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spate of studies showing a tight connection between inequitable access to healthcare, welfare services, and adverse outcomes from the pandemic. Others have...
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– An investigation of India’s employment guarantee programme
Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries.We focus on one such administrative failure—the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a life cycle...
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– Theory and evidence from India
What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...
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– The doubly false premise of rules reform
The World Bank’s Doing Business reports have evoked an intense policy debate about whether countries should simplify regulatory rules in order to stimulate investment and growth, or make them more stringent in order to achieve public policy objectives. Both sides of this debate, however, assume that...
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– Do political institutions matter?
Corruption is widely believed to negatively affect economic growth. However, many East and Southeast Asia countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption — the ‘East Asian Paradox’. Is this negative relationship equally likely to...
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– Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in India
In emerging economies, pro-social policy outcomes may be prevented by bureaucratic inefficiency, capture by elected or non-elected office holders, or by other hurdles. For local citizens, uncertainty about the true cause of such failures often prevails. We study the pro-sociality of politicians’...
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This study presents a comprehensive picture of poverty changes in China in the period of 1978-95. Using two micro-data sets from Household Income Surveys of 1988 and 1995, the author examines poverty distribution among various localities and population sub-groups. The results show that poverty has...
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– Key Issues and Lessons from Vietnam
This paper examines the impact of the transition to a market economy on health and education outcomes in transitional Asia, with particular focus on the case of Vietnam. After examining a variety of empirical evidence, several lessons emerge. First, protecting and improving health and education...
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This paper's goal is to increase the understanding of the inequality trends during the transitional period in China. From 1978 to 1995, China has been undergoing 18 years far-reaching economic system reform and opening to the outside world nationwide. During the transitional periods, the average...
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– Welfare Impact of Slow Transition
Uzbekistan is typically seen as one of the slowest reformers among the countries in transition from central planning to a market-oriented economy. This paper evaluates the welfare impact of gradual transition in Uzbekistan, asking whether it has avoided the short-term disruption associated with more...
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In examining the welfare situation, this paper explores the relationship between economic changes and social development in Asian transition economies. Under the central planning system, achievements in human development in these countries were commonly greater than the level of economic development...
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According to information issued at the World Food Summit held in Rome in 1996, about one fifth of the world's population is now living under the poverty line, and this number is increase by 25 million people in developing countries every year. For the purpose of maintaining social stability and...
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The economies in transition are experiencing unique changes in the distribution of assets. The growth in the share of private ownership is occurring through the privatization of state-owned assets and through the birth of private firms. The changes in the property rights regime are exceptionally...
Displaying 16 of 17 results