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Publications (82)
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– Finn Church Aid’s Secondment in Somalia
Donors face distinct challenges in operating in fragile states and supporting the building of state capacity. This paper explores one type of assistance – the ‘embedding’ of highly-skilled staff members within local government agencies – through a unique case study of Finn Church Aid’s experience...
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We conducted a systematic review to identify policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries. Relying on a theory of change typology, we highlight three main drivers of change of education quality: first, supply-side capability interventions that...
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This paper develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resort to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 51 African countries covering the period 1980 to 2012...
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Rwanda and Burundi have both emerged from civil wars over the past 20 years and foreign donors have provided significant contributions to post-conflict reconstruction and development in the two countries. Yet although Rwanda and Burundi share several important characteristics, the social, political...
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Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines...
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– Public Financial Management Reforms in Sierra Leone
Since the end of the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone has made substantial progress in strengthening public financial management. Improvements have been achieved across all aspects of the budget cycle and are particularly notable with regard to budget execution functions. The main factors...
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– Comparing Design and Implementation Errors Across Alternative Mechanisms
Identifying the poorest for selection into social transfer programmes is a major challenge facing programme implementers. An innovative cash transfer programme in northern Kenya trialed three targeting mechanisms to learn lessons about which approach is most effective at minimizing inclusion and...
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– Aggregating Impacts of School-Feeding Programmes on Education, Health and Nutrition: Two Proposed Methodologies
School-feeding is an important intervention to attract children to school and augment their learning. The benefits of school-feeding cover several domains. Key to the overall assessment of these benefits is understanding how different implementation models compare to each other and to other...
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– The Impact of Oportunidades’ Electronic Payment System in Mexico
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have implications in terms of reallocation between saving...
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– Comparing Indonesia and Nigeria
This paper analyses the role of foreign aid to assist development in two oil-rich countries: Indonesia and Nigeria. This paper seeks to understand the way foreign aid provided assistance to transform Indonesia from a ‘fragile’ state in the 1960s into one of the ‘Asian Tigers’ in the mid-1990s, and...
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The reduction in deaths from diarrheal diseases is one of the significant public health successes of the twentieth century. That said, the disease still accounts for a significant burden of childhood morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Progress made in the past has, to a...
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– Evidence from a Panel Threshold Framework
The aid-growth literature has been explored using a wide range of econometric methodologies. The evidence of the effectiveness of aid to promote economic growth is mixed, suggesting that the link between aid and growth is complex and may not be well identified by traditional methods. We take another...
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Why are some countries more successful at carrying out post-conflict reconstruction programmes than others? Why has Sierra Leone been more successful in the reform of its armed forces than Liberia has after the end of the Mano River Basin wars? This paper argues that the diverging outcomes are...
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– The WDR+20 Landscape of Core and Supportive Functions
This paper discusses shifts in development assistance for health (DAH) since 1990, analyses the nature of the current distribution of funding, and considers future implications. Based on Jamison et al. (1998) and Frenk and Moon (2013), we introduce an ‘essential functions’ framework, which provides...
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– The Case of Somali-Inhabited Eastern Horn of Africa
Institution-building in Somalia has met with high levels of failure for two decades. But successes have occurred in other Somali-inhabited regions of the eastern Horn, and have been especially present at the local and municipal level. The most effective aid to institution-building in Somalia has...
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– UNICEF’s Education Programme in Somalia
The failure of the Somali state from 1993 to 2012 represents one of the world’s most profound and prolonged cases of state collapse. Initially, education and other government services came to a standstill. With the halt of fighting in some areas, local communities with the support of the United...
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