Social funds and decentralisation: optimal institutional design.

Most of the 60+ developing countries that have established social funds (SFs) are decentralising their governments as well. But the question of how to tailor SFs - originally a highly centralised model - for a decentralising context has received relatively little attention in the literature. We first examine evidence on the ability of SFs to adapt to a decentralised context. We then lay out the implications of decentralisation for SF institutional design step-by-step through the project cycle. The topic is doubly important because social funds can increase their effectiveness, and the sustainability of their investments, by reorganising internal processes to take advantage of the political and civic institutions that decentralisation creates. Local government has an informational advantage in local needs and characteristics (time and place), whereas SFs have access to better technology and knowledge of sectoral best practice. The key is to create institutional incentives that best combine these relative advantages.

Implications of the Covid-19 Pandemic for Economic and Demographic Research

The author contends that the pandemic may undo decades of progress in advancing gender equality, reproductive health—even the structural shift toward lower fertility in many developing countries

Groups, location and wellbeing: Social and spatial determinants of inequality in Madagascar.

This thesis studies non-monetary dimensions of wellbeing inequality in Madagascar from a geographic and group perspective (see Kanbur 2006, Stewart 2002, Barrett et al. 2005). The work opens with an introductory review of the growing importance of spatial and group-level information for the design of poverty alleviation policies. Chapter 2 presents a case study of historical inequalities in human capital accumulation among Christians and non-Christians in Madagascar. Detailed contextual and econometric evidence suggests that lower educational outcomes among non-Christians today originate in an uneven geographic distribution of Christian missionary schools over much of the 19th Century. Because spatial inequalities in school provision created at the time cut across contemporary religious divides, educational policies in favour of the non-Christian population will need to be accompanied by considerable investments in the public school network. The second, more conceptual part of the thesis explores practical and analytical applications of the proposed group and geographic perspective in the context of the literature on programme targeting and wellbeing analysis. The first chapter in this section presents an asset index that allows for two-dimensional comparisons of interpersonal and spatial inequalities in the areas of public service provision and private wealth. In the context of Madagascar, this method suggests considerable reversals in geographic targeting priorities when compared to existing studies that rely on household consumption as the sole indicator of wellbeing. The next chapter draws on group-level information to operationalize Amartya Sen's capability approach. While it is usually impossible to directly observe a person's capability set (the range of valuable outcomes an individual can theoretically achieve), this paper argues that an indication of the extent of capability inequality can be obtained by observing differences in wellbeing outcomes across relevant groups or areas (see Roemer 1998). Applied to the analysis of interreligious and urban-rural inequalities in Madagascar, this method uncovers significant and persistent differences in wellbeing opportunity in a range of non-monetary dimensions. The last chapter concludes and identifies possible directions for future research within the proposed group-based approach

Perceptions of social class in Africa. Results from a conjoint experiment

Africa’s so-called ‘new middle classes’ are receiving increasing attention. So far, much of this debate has been based on ‘objective’ criteria like household income or asset wealth. This article follows an emerging literature that asks Africans directly how they perceive class differences in their societies. In doing so we engage with the inherent multidimensionality of class experiences, which makes it harder for respondents to distinguish their own and others’ class status and to determine which indicators should enter into a socially meaningful conceptualization of class. The article innovates by addressing these challenges with the help of a factorial or ‘conjoint’ experiment. Conjoint experiments are well suited for analyzing complex multidimensional phenomena like class because they allow researchers to distinguish the separate effects of individual treatment components on outcomes such as perceived class status. Using primary survey data from Kenya, we find that the shift to the experimental setting reduces respondents’ problems to distinguish people’s class status, especially at the middle of the socio-economic ladder. The analysis also shows that income can serve as a useful proxy for subjective class. Nonetheless, other non-monetary dimensions like assets, education, or employment type also enter with small but statistically significant effects. Finally, we find that perceptions of ‘middle-classness’ often overlap with relatively severe experiences of economic insecurity. This latter result suggests that Western concepts of economically secure middle classes should not be uncritically applied to a lower-income region like Africa. The results hold across a range of robustness and external validity tests using Kenyan and multi-country Afrobarometer survey data.This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) through its Academic Excellence and Societal Challenges initiative [grant numbers CSO2017-87350-P and PID2022-140461NB-I00] and through the European Research Council [grant number 864333]

Long-term consequences of colonial institutions and human capital investments: sub-national evidence from Madagascar

This study from Madagascar exploits local variation in the timing and organization of colonial settlement and missionary education to distinguish long-run effects of colonial institutions and human capital. Results indicate that only colonial institutions had robust impacts on local economic outcomes. Analysis of transmission mechanisms suggests that these effects are explained by higher-quality property rights institutions, but not by persistence in economic activities like the production of cash crops. There are also indications that migration-induced human capital spill-overs from missionary areas contributed to superior outcomes in former settler districts

Poverty reduction and democratization – new cross-country evidence

Inclou supplemental materialThe rapid decrease in absolute poverty across the developing world has received much attention. However, there have been few systematic attempts to analyse the political consequences of these developments. This article builds on the improved availability of household income data from developing countries to document a small but statistically significant impact of lagged poverty rates on a range of democracy indicators. The results hold across a battery of sensitivity and robustness tests. I also show that poverty reduction has a stronger effect on democracy than alternative predictors that are more widely used in the democratic regime transition and consolidation literature, such as average income and relative inequality (the Gini index). However, I find weaker effects of poverty on indicators of government quality and a declining influence of poverty reduction on democracy over time. These results point to more structural obstacles to democratic consolidation in lower-income regions, such as a tendency by populist leaders to exploit the economic grievances of vulnerable lower-middle classes.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) through its Academic Excellence and Societal Challenges initiative [grant number CSO2017-87350-P]

The developing world’s "new middle classes": implications for political research

Rapid middle-income growth over the past decades has led to increasing public interest in the developing world’s “new middle classes”. However, these transformations have received less attention in the comparative democratization and welfare-state regime literature. In this review article, we aim to fill this gap by identifying emerging evidence and new directions for research about the social and political consequences of lower-middle income growth. We note that, while socio-cultural and political transformations traditionally associated with expanding middle classes are unlikely to materialize at current levels of socio-economic wellbeing in most developing countries, new pressures for reform may arise out of demands to better protect modest increases in private assets and from improved educational outcomes among lower-middle income groups. We also identify signs of increased distributional conflicts between economically vulnerable lower-middle income groups and more-affluent middle classes that may undermine the transition to stable democracy and more inclusive social policy systems