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Publications (32)
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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– Political economy issues and policy vistas
This study reviews the political economy issues surrounding the 2008 food crisis in Nigeria; the lessons learned from management of the crisis; analyses the performance of policies aimed at stabilizing prices; and proffers policy measures for preventing future occurrence. The study finds that the...
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– Learning some lessons
India’s policy responses to the food price crisis were strong. Exports of basic staples were banned. Domestic support prices of wheat and rice were raised substantially. The urea price increases in global markets were absorbed through enhanced fertilizer subsidies. The government launched the...
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– A synthesis
This paper identifies eight political economy factors that influenced governments’ policy choices during the most recent global food price crisis. To explain the variety of responses and the policy failures, a framework is proposed that locates policies along the twin dimensions of unitary vs...
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– a Framework for Analysis and Lessons from Country Studies
During the recent food crisis, developing countries responded with a wide variety of policy responses to protect their population. Understanding the policy-making process in developing countries is important to know why such policy responses are made and how various actors and players shape up and...
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– the Food Policy Crisis
The food price crisis revealed contradictions in creating food policy. Much of the common policy response can be explained by a benevolent, unitary government. To understand the variance between countries, however, requires understanding fractured government decision-making, path dependency, and...
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The overall goal of this paper is to analyse the political economy of food price policies in China during the global food crisis. The results show that given China’s unique economic and political context and the nature of its agricultural markets, the government’s reaction to the crisis was swift...
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– Country Case Study of Mozambique
The 2007-09 price shocks affected in particular the prices of food commodities and fuel. As a consequence, Mozambique experienced reduced exports, more expensive imports and increased food and oil prices, contributing to the stagnant poverty rates registered in 2008/9. Our analysis finds, first...
Displaying 16 of 32 results