Working Paper
On the impact of inequality on growth, human development, and governance
Countering recent rises in many countries of inequality in income and wealth is widely recognized as a major development challenge. This is so from an ethical perspective and because greater inequality is perceived to be detrimental to key...
Working Paper
Clientelism and governance
Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author’s general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that...
Background Note
Review of sub-national institutional performance in Ghana
IntroductionThe literature on the concept, measurement, causes, and correlates of sub-national institutional governance is not new. From the seminal work of Putnam et al. (1993) to recent attempts by Iddawela et al. (2021), several authors have...
Working Paper
Clientelistic politics and pro-poor targeting
Past research has provided evidence of clientelistic politics in delivery of programme benefits by local governments, or gram panchayats (GPs), and manipulation of GP programme budgets by legislators and elected officials at upper tiers in West...
Blog
Why should I care about economic growth?
Director of UNU-WIDER, Professor Kunal Sen is a world leading expert in development economics and led on ESID’s research into economic growth. In this...
Journal Special Issue
Clientelist Politics and Development
Political clientelism — which reflects strategic, discretionary, and targeted exchange of private goods and services for political support to the incumbent — has characterised distributive politics in the Global South for decades. The conditional...
Working Paper
Local governance quality and law compliance
Using panel data of manufacturing enterprises in Mozambique between 2012 and 2017, we investigate how changes in perceived quality of governance are related to firms’ law compliance. Controlling for firm-level unobserved heterogeneity, we look at...
Working Paper
What does the evidence tell us about ‘thinking and working politically’ in development assistance?
This paper critically reviews evidence on ‘thinking and working politically’ in development. Scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognised that development is fundamentally political, and efforts are underway to develop more politically...
Journal Article
Introducing the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions and Support (MAPS) dataset on the Colombian peace process
This article introduces the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions and Support (MAPS) dataset, which provides rich survey data from more than 12,000 respondents in Colombia. Our panel survey – carried out in two separate waves in 2019 and 2021 – is...
Working Paper
Frontier rule and conflict
We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face...
Working Paper
Do fences make good neighbours?
India has employed a variety of military, political, and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural...
Working Paper
New industrial policy and the extractive industries
Industrial policy is back. Advocates for industrial policy argue that the important question is not whether such policies should be applied at all, but how to design and implement them. For the extractive industries this development poses a challenge...
Working Paper
Pro-poor growth in Indonesia
This chapter addresses the unrelenting pessimism in Asian Drama about Indonesia’s development prospects. This pessimism was based on two key realities: the poor level of governance demonstrated by the Sukarno regime (partly a heritage of Dutch...