Does clientelism perpetuate the weak state capacity that characterizes many young democracies? Prior work explains that clientelist parties skew public spending to private goods and under-supply public goods. Building on these insights, this article argues that clientelism creates a bureaucratic...

There has been a phenomenal global increase in the proportion of women in politics in the last 20 years. While there is evidence that raising the share of women politicians has substantive impacts on the composition of government spending, there is scarcely any evidence of how it influences...

In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite budgets of all 216 MMDAs, we...

In spite of having some intensive national strategies to address poverty, Tanzania lacks a coherent national strategy to ensure sustainable livelihoods for those working in its informal economy, of which street vending is an important sector. Based on qualitative, in-depth data collected through...

Sub-Saharan African cities have been growing at historically unprecedented rates. Since the early 1970s, they have welcomed international assistance involving a succession of major thematic objectives. The main agency involved in urban assistance has been the World Bank. But as its goals have...

This paper evaluates transformative policy innovations with respect to security and taxation in the three main Colombian cities: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. In the first two, such policies were associated with huge success. Elsewhere we (Gutiérrez et al. 2009) have tagged these transformation...

Institution-building in Somalia has met with high levels of failure for two decades. But successes have occurred in other Somali-inhabited regions of the eastern Horn, and have been especially present at the local and municipal level. The most effective aid to institution-building in Somalia has...

Since the 1980s, the promotion of heritage values has gradually become a relevant issue for urban planning. Together with the emergence of new peripheries, inner-city areas and particularly old historic centres, affected by deterioration due to the recession of the last decades, have been the...

In an introductory section, this paper considers briefly the achievements and problems of urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa through an assessment of three categories: administrative reform, developmental issues and conflicts over service delivery issues. It then goes on to assess...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset on firm-level corruption. It contains quantitative information on bribe payments by a sample of formal and informal Vietnamese firms. We show that bribe incidence is highly associated with firm-level differences in (i) visibility, (ii) sunk costs, (iii)...