Low income countries, and in particular countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, have invested huge resources over the last 40 years in financing higher (university level) education, compared with the number of students at that level and with the corresponding expenditures for lower levels of education. I propose and test an elite capture hypothesis: that expenditure in tertiary education is partly used as a tool for redistribution towards the elites close to the political leaders. I fi nd that this hypothesis can explain a substantial part of the within-country variation in expenditures levels.
AbstractThis study is an evaluation of the impact of a food for education program implemented in primary schools (grades 1–6) in six Cambodian provinces between 1999 and 2003. We find that school enrolment increased to varying degrees in relation to different designs of the intervention. We also investigate the effect of the program in terms of completed education and probability of having ever been in school, following up the affected cohorts in a 2009 survey. With an estimated cost of US$85 per additional child in school per year, the program can be considered very cost‐effective within a comparable class of interventions.
We argue that the tilt towards donor interests over recipient needs in aid allocation and practices may be particularly strong in new partnerships. Using the natural experiment of Eastern transition we find that commercial and strategic concerns influenced both aid flows and entry in the first half of the 1990s, but much less so later on. We also find that fractionalization increased and that early aid to the region was particularly volatile, unpredictable and tied. Our results may explain why aid to Iraq and Afghanistan has had little development impact and serve as warning for Burma and Arab Spring regimes.
We argue that the nature of aid flows early on in a bilateral partnership may be different from that at a later stage. Commercial and strategic interests may carry particular weight after a significant regime change when new relationships need to be established, whereas development concerns come to carry greater weight as the relationship matures. We test this argument using the natural experiment of the break-up of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. By looking at the allocation of aid across recipients, how that allocation has changed over time, and the urgency by which donors entered certain markets, we get a sense of the donors' changing priorities. We find that trade flows and geographical proximity lead to more aid during the early period, 1990-95, but not after that. On the other hand, political openness and natural disasters have no effect in the early going but are correlated with more aid in the later time period. We also find that donors are in more urgency to enter into countries with higher per capita incomes and with which they trade, but they also prioritize more democratic countries in this respect. Our results hold up to a thorough sensitivity analysis, including using a gravity model to instrument for bilateral trade flows. Our findings may have implications for what to expect about partnerships, and the role of aid, emerging between Western donors and new regimes put in place by the Arab Spring.
Leniency policies and asymmetric punishment are regarded as potentially powerful anticorruption tools, also in the light of their success in busting price-fixing cartels. It has been argued, however, that the introduction of these policies in China in 1997 has not helped fighting corruption. Following up on this view, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party passed, in November 2015, a reform introducing heavier penalties, but also restrictions to leniency. Properly designing and correctly evaluating these policies is difficult. Corruption is only observed if detected, and an increase in convictions is consistent with both reduced deterrence or improved detection. We map the evolution of the Chinese anti-corruption legislation, collect data on corruption cases for the period 1986-2010, and apply a new method to identify deterrence effects from changes in detected cases developed for cartels by Miller (2009). We document a large and stable fall in corruption cases starting immediately after the 1997 reform, consistent with a negative effect of the reform on corruption detection, but under specific assumptions also with increased deterrence. To resolve this ambiguity, we collect and analyze a random sample of case files from corruption trials. Results point to a negative effect of the 1997 reform, linked to the increased leniency also for bribe-takers cooperating after being denounced. This likely enhanced their ability to retaliate against reporting bribe-givers – chilling detection through whistleblowing – as predicted by theories on how these programs should (not) be designed.
