Working Paper
Revisiting the methodology of Myrdal in Asian Drama 50 years on
This paper reviews the main methodological innovations in Asian Drama. It considers whether Myrdal’s perspectives have been adopted by development analysts, and where fresh thinking is needed, particularly in the light of changes occurring in the...
Working Paper
Institutional bypass and aid effectiveness in Africa
Many practical and action-oriented international roadmaps to improve the quality of aid and its delivery and impact on development—including the Paris Declaration, Accra Agenda for Action, and Busan Partnership—emphasize a more active involvement of...
Working Paper
Understanding the boom
There are large volumes of gas offshore Tanzania, which has raised hopes of a boom. But those hopes look set to be disappointed. A boom would depend on there being a sizeable flow of revenue to government from producing and exporting gas. This paper...
Working Paper
Understanding the boom
A significant natural resource discovery creates excited popular expectations of imminent wealth. But the size of a boom is usually overestimated and the delay in receiving revenues is underestimated. This paper takes stock of the sequencing, timing...
Working Paper
What are the drivers of tax capacity in sub-Saharan Africa?
There is limited research on the underlying institutional framework of tax policy and capacity: how tax collection efficiency changes over time and the importance of institutional factors in this process.This paper fills this gap by devising a...
Working Paper
Good institutions and tax revenue outcomes in resource-rich countries
Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal...
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
Community organization and armed group behaviour
This paper investigates how armed groups affect the organization of local communities during armed conflict in Colombia. We estimate the effect of communities’ exposure to armed groups with an econometric specification that takes into account...
Working Paper
Constraints on the executive and tax revenues in the long run
We argue that tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and so co-evolve in the long run. This may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues, from taxes levied on a...
Working Paper
Corruption and crisis: do institutions matter?
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...
Working Paper
The relative neglect of agriculture in Mozambique
This paper explores agricultural performance of Mozambique, its institutional weaknesses, and the underlying factors that underpin an unsatisfactory performance during many decades. We point to the role of systemic political instability and violence...
Journal Article
The political economy of the resource curse
This article reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to key development outcomes. To date, this area has received less analysis, although it is relevant to...
Blog
Our project on the institutional legacies of violent conflict
One of the most critical challenges in international development today is to understand how best to support peace, security, economic recovery, and...
Blog
The paths and legacies of civil war
by
Anastasia Shesterinina
March 2021
Civil wars leave enduring legacies for social networks, political identities, preferences, and attitudes. Their impacts on public perceptions of peace...
Working Paper
Inequality, institutions, and cooperation
We examine the effects of randomly introduced economic inequality on voluntary cooperation, and whether this relationship is influenced by the quality of local institutions, as proxied by corruption. We use representative data from a large-scale lab...