Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (43)
Working Paper
pdf
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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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’...
Working Paper
pdf
The distinction between development assistance and climate finance is driven by an optic of compensation largely derived from the ‘polluter pays’ principle. For practical as well as conceptual reasons, this principle provides a weak basis for climate finance. The distinction also cuts against the...
Working Paper
pdf
Mozambique benefits from environmental aid-related funds, but it is still unclear whether donor commitments render directly into projects that are copiously implemented for the purposes stated and what aid flows have actually been doing and are doing in the area of aid and environment in Mozambique...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Tanzania
This paper provides an assessment of what aid has actually been doing in the area of environment in Tanzania through a critical review of the flows, modalities and management of aid. Focusing on the funding for environmental degradation projects, the study notes that budget expenditure allocation to...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Synthesis of Eight Case Studies
This study seeks to understand what aid flows have been doing to the environment in eight countries in Eastern, Western and Southern Africa. Total aid to these countries’ environmental sectors for the 2000s decade is about US$10.17 billion and bilateral aid has been on the rise. There seems to have...
Working Paper
pdf
– Field Evidence from South Africa and Uganda
A new methodology, Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows (TUFF), allows us to systematically gather open-source information—e.g. news reports, case studies, project inventories from embassy websites, and grant and loan data published by recipient governments—about Chinese development finance...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Botswana
Botswana has serious environmental problems which, if not addressed, will undermine the attainment of sustainable economic development. This study attempts to determine what aid flows have actually been doing with regard to the environment in Botswana. The results show that although both the...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Senegal
The paper reviews the dynamics of the financing based its analysis on the rich dataset of AidData ranging over 1993-2010, with around 9,077 observations on projects funded in Senegal by various multilateral as well as bilateral donors. The study started in the same year as the establishment of the...
Displaying 16 of 43 results