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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The manufacturing sector is an important source of productivity growth and exports. Manufacturing firms are generally more productive than firms in the agricultural or services sectors and are an important source of job creation. Little is known...
The South African Revenue Service and National Treasury Firm-Level Panel is an unbalanced panel data set created by merging several sources of administrative tax data received during 2015. The four data sources that constitute the panel are: company...
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...
Tony Addison This month saw UNU-WIDER in Stockholm for the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the social sectors’, which took place at Sida on 13 March...
Current development practice focuses too much on the form institutions take, at the expense of worrying about function. A focus on strict rules that aim to curb corruption and inefficiency can diminish the amount of experimentation and adaptation...
The civil service is the backbone of the state, and can either support or undermine a country’s entire system of governance. Donor’s recognize this important fact and have often tried to promote civil service reform in the countries they are...
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...
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...
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...
Over the last few years we have observed a prominent flourishing of empirical studies on the determinants of new business creation and its effect on the economy. The present study focuses on an important determinant of entrepreneurship: the quality...
This paper reviews the state of knowledge on the effectiveness of donor interventions aimed at improving the regulatory environment for private sector development in developing countries. Where regulatory reform is undertaken, the expectation is that...
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...
Part of Journal Special Issue Explaining Violent Conflict
Part of Journal Special Issue Explaining Violent Conflict
30 October 2013 Roger Williamson The UNU-WIDER meeting held last week in New York on the topic of fragility and aid argued forcefully that you cannot...
In examining the study of government performance, this paper asks whether field experiments can improve the explanatory precision of results generated by public opinion surveys. Survey research on basic health and education services sub-Saharan...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aiding Government Effectiveness in Developing Countries
Part of 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...
Part of Book Debt Relief for Poor Countries
Part of Book Reforming Africa's Institutions
A comparative study of the public distribution systems of foodgrains in India and China is expected to reveal lessons and experiences that are valuable to policymakers. This is particularly important for developing countries in their endeavour to...
Institutions are not only created and built, but also, and especially, need to be learnt. It is a process which takes place in all economies, but acquires a special importance in less advanced countries. Not only theoretical arguments, but also the...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Book Achieving Development Success
Part of Journal Special Issue Fragility and Development in Small Island Developing States
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book The Role of Elites in Economic Development
Part of Book Understanding Small-Island Developing States
Part of Journal Special Issue Civil War in Developing Countries
Part of Book Entrepreneurship and Economic Development
Part of Book Reforming Africa's Institutions
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...
Part of Book Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure
Part of Book Reforming Africa's Institutions
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...
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...
Part of Book Institutional Change and Economic Development
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Part of Book Resource Abundance and Economic Development
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...
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...
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...
Join the network
