This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it provides new evidence of the impact of community monitoring interventions using a unique dataset from the Citizen Visible Audit (CVA) program in Colombia. In particular, this article studies the effect of social audits on...

This paper explores the characteristics of the political economy process that conditioned the scope and success of the combination of fiscal reforms before and after Colombia’s 1991 constitutional reforms. Using formal analysis of reforms and interviews with actors, reforms in taxation,...

European Enlightenment thinkers were right in stressing the political dimension of inequality, rather than referring to "natural differences" as some others did after them in the 19th or 20th centuries. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical contributions in social sciences and in...

This paper examines how the main characteristics of Argentina’s policymaking process (PMP) affect the productivity of its economy using the conceptual framework presented in Murillo, Scartascini and Tommasi (2008), Stein et al. (2008), Spiller and Tommasi (2007), and IDB (2005). First, the...

I propose a personal reading of some theories of social justice at a moment when the issue of equality or equity appears to be back on the ‘development agenda’. Nowadays the term equity tends to be most often associated with the equality of opportunity principle. After having briefly...

(english) The classical and more recent theories on development all fail to explain Madagascar’s long-running economic underperformance. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of Malagasy history based on the analytical framework of political economy. Our analyses point to the fact that,...

(english) This paper is an attempt to assess the relevance of the use of the North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) framework to explain the performances of Burkina Faso in terms of economic growth and development. The political history of Burkina Faso has been very unstable until president Campaoré...

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

This book presents a new framework for analyzing the political economy of budget processes in Latin America that is based on the following premises: i) the budget process must be considered as part of the overall policymaking process rather than in isolation; ii) budget outcomes cannot be fully...

(english) This last decade has seen the emergence of a new field of research in development economics: randomised control trials. This paper explores the contrast between the (many) limitations and (very narrow) real scope of these methods and their success in sheer number and media coverage....