Working Paper
Food Marketing Reconsidered
The liberalization of food marketing has been implemented as part of structural adjustment programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this study we assess i) the aims of reform policy, ii) the implementation of specific reform measures, iii) the politics...
Working Paper
The Risks to Education Systems from Design Mismatch and Global Isomorphism
The incredibly low levels of learning and the generally dysfunctional public sector schooling systems in many (though not all) developing countries are the result of a capability trap (Pritchett et al. 2010). Two phenomena reinforce persistent...
Working Paper
Evaluating Governance Indexes
Recent years have seen a proliferation of ‘composite indicators’ or ‘indexes’ of governance. Such measures can be useful tools for analysing governance, making public policy, building scientific knowledge, and even influencing ruling elites, but some...
Journal Special Issue
Aiding Government Effectiveness in Developing Countries
For more than two decades, addressing constraints to better governance in developing countries has been a priority issue for the international donor community. Recent changes to aid modalities have further prioritized the need for improving...
Working Paper
Explaining Positive Deviance in Public Sector Reforms in Development
Public sector reforms are commonplace in developing countries. Much of the literature about these reforms reflects on their failures. This paper asks about the successes and investigates which of two competing theories best explain why some reforms...
Working Paper
Civil Service Reform
Civil service reform is one of the most intractable yet important challenges for governments and their supporters today. However, civil service reform thus far has largely failed. Based on a review of existing literature, this paper presents...
Working Paper
Escaping Capability Traps Through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look...
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...
Book
Reforming Africa's Institutions
There is not a single African country that did not attempt public sector reforms in the 1990s. Governments no longer see themselves as sole suppliers of social services, frequently opting for partnerships with the private sector. Efficiency and...
Book
The Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies
Since the end of the cold war, civil wars and state violence have escalated, resulting in thousands of deaths. This book provides a toolbox for donors, international agencies, and developing countries to prevent humanitarian emergencies. The emphasis...
Working Paper
The Political Economy of Taxation and Tax Reform in Developing Countries
Taxation provides one of the principal lenses in measuring state capacity, state formation and power relations in a society. This paper critically examines three main approaches (economic, administrative and political economy) to understanding...
Working Paper
Modern Bureaucracy
Max Weber believed that bureaucracy could be understood by analysing its ideal-typical characteristics, and that these characteristics would become more pervasive as the modern age advanced. Weber’s horizontal account of bureaucracy can be criticised...
Working Paper
Affirmative action and effort choice
We study the effect of affirmative action on effort in an experiment conducted in high schools in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas in Queensland, Australia. All participating schools have a large representation of indigenous Australians, a...
Working Paper
Aid Project Proliferation and Absorptive Capacity
Much public discussion about foreign aid has focused on whether and how to increase its quantity. But recently aid quality has come to the fore, by which is meant the efficiency of the aid delivery process. This paper focuses on one process problem...
Working Paper
Tax Policy Reforms in Nigeria
Nigeria is governed by a federal system, hence its fiscal operations also adhere to the same principle, a fact which has serious implications on how the tax system is managed. The country’s tax system is lopsided, and dominated by oil revenue. It is...
Journal Article
Developing and Evaluating Governance Indexes
Recent years have seen a proliferation of composite indicators or indexes of governance and their use in research and policy-making. This article proposes a framework of 10 questions to guide both the development and evaluation of such indexes. In...
Journal Article
Escaping Capability Traps Through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
Many development initiatives fail to improve performance because they promote isomorphic mimicry—governments change what they look like, not what they do. This article proposes a new approach to doing development, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation...
Working Paper
The Mozambican Civil Service
The post-independence Mozambican civil service, what was left of it following the exodus of Portuguese settlers in the mid-1970s, was poorly educated, with low incentives. In subsequent years, the combination of a war-ravaged economy, poor human...
Working Paper
Incentive Structure, Civil Service Efficiency and the Hidden Economy in Nigeria
Successive governments in Nigeria have introduced reforms aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the civil service. Still, the service remains inefficient and incapable of reforming itself, let alone the rest of the economy...
Working Paper
HIPC Relief: Too Late, Too Little?
In 1970 the external debt of Tanzania, a least developed country, was 16.8 per cent of GDP and 58.6 per cent of exports. The ratio of per capita debt to per capita income was 14.4 per cent. By 2001 the debt had reached just over 100 per cent of GDP...
Working Paper
Incentive Structure and Efficiency in the Kenyan Civil Service
Kenya’s civil service expanded rapidly after independence, becoming by far the largest in East Africa. Following economic decline since the 1980s, however, it became difficult for the government to sustain a large and inefficient public sector. To...
Working Paper
Owning Economic Reforms
This paper compares reform ownership in Ghana and Tanzania over the past two decades. It finds that on several dimensions, Ghana’s early economic reforms enjoyed a high degree of ownership. That ownership was not embedded, however, in a politico...
Working Paper
Fuelling War or Buying Peace
Corruption is endogenous to many political structures and serves key functions beyond the self-interest of public officials and politicians. Like violence, corruption participates in political ordering and, although corruption may in itself play a...
Working Paper
Paradise is a Bazaar? Greed, Creed, Grievance and Governance
This study examines the relative merits of grievance-based explanations of civil conflict that stress ‘Malthusian crises’ and ‘creed-related,’ civilizational clashes against competing propositions of greed- and governance-related explanations. The...
Working Paper
Economic and Institutional Reforms in French-Speaking West Africa
This essay examines some outcomes of two decades of market oriented reforms in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). In general, economic performance, measured by growth of per capita incomes, has not been encouraging, despite far...
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
HIPC Debt Relief and Policy Reform Incentives
In this paper, I discuss the incentives that the HIPC Initiative could create in debtor countries in favour of economic adjustment and reform. The usual debt-overhang argument, stating that debt relief will increase the net benefits of reforms, needs...
Working Paper
Changing Approaches to Public Expenditure Management in Low-Income Aid Dependent Countries
The present paper critically examines how aid dependent low-income countries have approached the process of public expenditure management reform during the 1990s. It begins with an overview of broader public sector reform initiatives in LDCs which...
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...
Working Paper
Rekindling Governments from Within
This paper shows how an elite cadre of public sector officials played a key role in the success of administrative reforms in Brazil’s state tax administration bureaus in the 1990s. The success of the reforms strengthened public sector bureaucracies...
Working Paper
Is it Possible to Reform a Customs Administration?
An ethnographic approach is applied to Cameroon customs in order to explore the role and the capacity of the bureaucratic elites to reform their institution. Fighting against corruption has led to the extraction and circulation of legal ‘collective...