What motivates individuals to become politicians? This is an important question in decentralized democracies, where local politicians play a key role in public goods provision. However, and in emerging economies, bureaucratic hurdles and administrative failures introduce uncertainty about the...

We provide a theory of political clientelism, which explains sources and determinants of political clientelism, the relationship between clientelism and elite capture, and their respective consequences for allocation of public services, welfare, and empirical measurement of government...

Using data from various rounds of the nationally representative NSSO survey between 1988 and 2012, we first construct national, state, and district-level figures for overall, within and between consumption inequality. We find an increase in inequality in India but only since 2004. We also...

This study explores the patterns and consequences of ethnic and regional inequalities in Pakistan. Using inter-district variation in inequality, ethnic fractionalization, and access to public goods, we extend the literature on public service provisioning by using finer estimates of between-group...

For the first time in Indonesia, we jointly analyse several economic statistics and ethnic diversity indicators at national and local levels. Nationally, we find very high levels of economic inequality, measured from household asset values or consumption expenditure. In contrast, the levels of...

The global framework for financing development, adopted in 2015, places great emphasis on mobilizing domestic resources to finance the Sustainable Development Goals, which include universal healthcare. In a recent paper Reeves et al. (2015) attribute progress towards universal healthcare to...

This paper uses income and expenditure surveys from 1992 to 2014 and public tax and spending accounts to estimate the redistributive impact of Mexico's fiscal system over this period. It presents standard and marginal benefit incidence analysis for the principal public transfers (education,...

Growth and poverty reduction in Africa are weakly linked. This paper argues that the reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation - the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors - has not featured in Africa's post-1995 growth story. As a...

Macroeconomic strategies and policies have differed significantly among Asian countries over the last fifty years, and yet some common issues recur despite their immense diversity in inherited historical initial conditions, differences in political systems, geo-political situations, location and...

We investigate within the context of Viet Nam how circumstances at age 15 or 16 relate to completion of upper secondary education four years later. We exploit the longitudinal elements of the Viet Nam Access to Resources Household Survey to identify household and commune characteristics and...