Devolution, Accountability, and Service Delivery in Pakistan

This paper examines into the relationship between devolution, accountability, and service delivery in Pakistan by examining the degree of accessibility of local policy-makers and the level of competition in local elections, the expenditure patterns of local governments to gauge their sectoral priorities, and the extent to which local governments are focused on patronage, or providing targeted benefits to a few as opposed to providing public goods. The main findings of the paper are threefold. First, the accessibility of policy-makers to citizens in Pakistan is unequivocally greater after devolution, and local government elections are, with some notable exceptions, as competitive as national and provincial elections. Second, local government sectoral priorities are heavily tilted towards the provision of physical infrastructure—specifically, roads, water and sanitation, and rural electrification—at the expense of education and health. Third, this sectoral prioritisation is in part a dutiful response to the relatively greater citizen demands for physical infrastructure; in part a reflection of the local government electoral structure that gives primacy to village and neighbourhood-specific issues; and in part a reaction to provincial initiatives in education and health that have taken the political space away from local governments in the social sectors, thereby encouraging them to focus more towards physical infrastructure.State and Local Government, Inter-government Relations, Political Processes, Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behaviour, Publically Provided Goods

Devolution, accountability, and service delivery : some insights from Pakistan

This paper studies the relationship between devolution, accountability, and service delivery in Pakistan. It examines the degree of accessibility of local policy-makers and the level of competition in local elections, the expenditure patterns of local governments to gauge their sector priorities, and the extent to which local governments are focused on patronage or the provision of targeted benefits to a few as opposed to providing public goods. The main findings of the paper are three-fold. First, the accessibility of policy-makers to citizens in Pakistan is unequivocally greater after devolution, and local government elections are, with some notable exceptions, as competitive as national and provincial elections. Second, local government sector priorities are heavily tilted toward the provision of physical infrastructure - specifically, roads, water and sanitation, and rural electrification - at the expense of education and health. Third, this sector prioritization is in part a dutiful response to the relatively greater citizen demands for physical infrastructure; in part a reflection of the local government electoral structure that gives primacy to village and neighborhood-specific issues, and in part a reaction to provincial initiatives in education and health that have taken the political space away from local governments in the social sectors, thereby encouraging them to focus more toward physical infrastructure.E-Government,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,E-Government,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Transport Economics Policy&Planning

Incentive compatible reforms : the political economy of public investments in Mongolia

Why do politicians distort public investments? And given that public investments are poor because presumably that is what is politically rational, what types of reforms are likely to be both efficiency improving and compatible with the interests of politicians? This paper explores these two questions in the context of Mongolia. It argues that Mongolian members of parliament have an incentive to over-spend on smaller projects that bring benefits to specific geographical localities and to under-spend on large infrastructure that would bring economic benefits to Mongolia on the whole. The incentive for the former is that members of parliament internalize the political benefits from the provision of particular, targeted benefits to specific communities. The disincentive for the latter is that large infrastructure carries a political risk because the political faction in control of that particular ministry would have access to huge rents and become politically too powerful. The identity of these"winners"is uncertain ex ante, given the relatively egalitarian and ethnically homogenous nature of Mongolia's society and polity. Anticipating this risk, members of parliament are reluctant to fund these projects. Since these large infrastructure projects are crucial for national growth, neglecting them hurts all members of parliament. Members of parliament will therefore support reforms that collectively tie their hands by safeguarding large, strategic investment projects from political interference thereby ensuring that no political faction becomes too powerful. This protection of mega-projects would need to be part of a bargain that also allows geographical targeting of some percentage of the capital budget.Debt Markets,Public Sector Expenditure Policy,Political Economy,Access to Finance,Parliamentary Government

The Politics of Service Delivery in Pakistan: Political Parties and the Incentives for Patronage, 1988-1999

This paper examines the impact of the political party structure on the incentives for politicians to focus on patronage versus service delivery improvements in Pakistan. By analysing inter-provincial variations in the quality of service delivery in Pakistan, the paper argues that the more fragmented, factionalised, and polarised the party systems, the greater are the incentives for patronage, weakening service delivery improvements. Fragmentation and factionalism both exacerbate the information problems that voters have in assigning credit (blame) for service delivery improvements (deterioration), thereby creating the incentives for politicians to focus on targeted benefits. Polarisation, particularly ethnic polarisation, reduces the ability of groups to agree on the provision of public goods, again causing politicians to favour the delivery of targeted benefits.Public Goods, Models of Political Processes: Rent Seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behaviour, Health, Education, and Welfare: General

The politics of power : the political economy of rent-seeking in electric utilities in the Philippines

This paper takes advantage of unique intra-country variation in the Philippines power sector to examine under what conditions politicians have an incentive to"capture"an electric utility and use it for the purposes of rent-seeking. The authors hypothesize that the level of capture is determined by the incentives of, and the interactions between, local and national politicians, where the concepts of"local"and"national"are context specific. A local politician is defined as one whose electoral jurisdiction lies within the utility’s catchment area; by contrast, a national politician is defined as one whose electoral jurisdiction includes two or more utility catchment areas. These jurisdictional differences imply different motivations for local and national politicians: because of"spillover"effects, local politicians have a greater incentive to use the utility for rent-seeking than a national politician as they capture only a portion of the political gains from utility performance improvements as some of the benefits of improved service will go to other electoral jurisdictions within the utility’s catchment area. The authors posit that three variables impact the magnitude of these incentives of local and national politicians: (i) the local economic context, specifically the scale of rents that can be extracted from an electricity cooperative (ii) the degree of competitiveness of local politics; and (iii) the political salience of an electricity cooperative’s catchment area for national politicians. The authors illustrate this framework through case studies of specific power utilities, and suggest some policy implications.Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Political Systems and Analysis,Politics and Government,Political Economy,Economic Theory&Research

A memory based random walk model to understand diffusion in crowded heterogeneous environment

We study memory based random walk models to understand diffusive motion in crowded heterogeneous environment. The models considered are non-Markovian as the current move of the random walk models is determined by randomly selecting a move from history. At each step, particle can take right, left or stay moves which is correlated with the randomly selected past step. There is a perfect stay-stay correlation which ensures that the particle does not move if the randomly selected past step is a stay move. The probability of traversing the same direction as the chosen history or reversing it depends on the current time and the time or position of the history selected. The time or position dependent biasing in moves implicitly corresponds to the heterogeneity of the environment and dictates the long-time behavior of the dynamics that can be diffusive, sub or super diffusive. A combination of analytical solution and Monte Carlo simulation of different random walk models gives rich insight on the effects of correlations on the dynamics of a system in heterogeneous environment

Disability and the Muslim Perspective: An Introduction for Rehabilitation and Health Care Providers

[Excerpt] This monograph offers an introduction to and overview of a broad spectrum and diversity of Muslims with disabilities and chronic health conditions who come from a variety of backgrounds and circumstances. The perspective provided here also highlights larger issues of human rights. Given the current immigration trends in the United States, it is critical that service providers work across cultures and systems to help Muslims access disability and health care services and resources in their communities. Over the years, service professionals and researchers have come to recognize that individuals with disabilities and health conditions do not always hold the same health beliefs, understandings, objectives, and priorities as the service providers they encounter. The result is an intercultural gap in understanding between clients and providers that may result in a poor treatment or rehabilitative outcome. This monograph will use the terms client, consumer, and patient interchangeably to denote those seeking disability services, medical services, or both. We emphasize that to bridge the gap between Muslim service users and mainstream U.S. service systems, service providers in disability and rehabilitation systems need to increase their sensitivity and ability to accommodate differences between their services and the needs of their clients

The Supply and Demand for Exports of Pakistan: The Polynomial Distributed Lag Model (PDL) Approach

In the global economy, the performance of any country will greatly depend on the performance of its exports. The trade performance determines the prospects of change. It helps countries win friends, and break the traditional mould of isolation and indifference. The performance of exports of countries depends on various price and non-price factors. In international trade transactions it is important to recognise that these transactions require some amount of time that occurs between the decision to buy and actual delivery of the product from foreign country. In the Econometric modelling lag occupies a central role. It is recognised that due to psychological, technical and institutional reasons, a dependent variable may respond to explanatory variables with lapse of time, in particular when dealing with time-series trade models. A number of studies have been conducted to examine the export performance of Pakistan. In the best of our knowledge, no study has been undertaken incorporating lags to examine the individual and cumulative impact of determinants of export performance of Pakistan. Thus, the ultimate purpose of this paper is to estimate consistent individual (short run) and cumulative (long run) elasticities of both export demand and supply determinants using annual data over the period 1972–2000 by applying Almon approach.