High coordination costs are often identified as the reason for the low quality of public goods available to the poor. We report findings from a unique combination of a village-randomized controlled trial and a lab-in-the-field experiment. An in-depth survey of 1,600 women before and after an intervention establishing membership-based organizations in one of the poorest districts in India shows that the presence of these groups increased villagers’ capacity to address water delivery problems, and improved access to, and quality of, water service. Public goods games with over 200 participants in a subset of control and treatment villages show that the presence of village groups increased cooperation among both members and non-members in treated villages. We find little evidence that cooperation is facilitated by more common tastes among group members. These results suggest that, in contrast to traditional community development programs, membership groups can help poor communities build social capital.
How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, in the years before the genocide, regularly used for spreading political propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional
variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that an additional rainy Saturday resulted in a five percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence. These results pass a number of indirect tests of the exclusion restriction as well as other robustness checks and placebo tests.
This document analyzes survey data from over 40 developing countries to understand determinants of radicalism, support for violence, and participation in anti-regime actions. It finds that individuals who feel politically and economically marginalized are more likely to harbor extremist views but less likely to join collective political movements. This potentially explains why marginalized groups are difficult to mobilize in nation-wide movements, despite their attitudes. It also finds that arenas for active political participation are more likely dominated by upper-middle income groups committed to preserving the status quo. Suppressing these forms of participation may push these groups towards more radical preferences. The findings suggest the poor may be caught in a cycle of increasing self-exclusion and marginalization.
Dictatorships do not survive by repression alone. Rather, dictatorial rule is often explained as an ― authoritarian bargain by which citizens relinquish political rights for economic security. The applicability of the authoritarian bargain to decision-making in non-democratic states, however, has not been thoroughly examined. We conceptualize this bargain as a simple game between a representative citizen and an autocrat who faces the threat of insurrection, and where economic transfers and political influence are simultaneously determined. Our model yields precise implications for the empirical patterns that are expected to exist. Tests of a system of equations with panel data comprising 80 non-democratic states between 1975 and 1999 confirm the predictions of the authoritarian-bargain thesis, with some variation across different categories of dictatorship.
This dissertation examines whether refugee influxes into fragile democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa increase levels of xenophobia. It analyzes South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda as case studies. The literature review discusses research on the economic and social impacts of refugees on host communities and links between refugee presence and xenophobic behavior. The methodology section outlines a qualitative comparative case study approach. The structure previews chapters on refugee terms/trends in SSA, links between xenophobia/fragile states, economic impacts of refugees, roles of regional economic unions, and responses in the three case study countries.
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.
This document summarizes a study examining the characteristics and effects of political influence on firms in developing countries. The study finds that politically influential firms receive economic benefits like lower taxes and easier access to credit. However, these firms also provide benefits to politicians through maintaining higher employment levels and paying more taxes. While influential firms earn higher profits, they are less productive than non-influential firms and are less likely to invest or innovate due to restrictions on firing workers and unpredictable taxes imposed on them. Overall, the study suggests that political influence undermines firm performance and can prolong economic underdevelopment.
In this paper I examine the development effects of military coups. Whereas previous economic literature has primarily viewed coups as a form of broader political instability, less research has focused on its development consequences independent of the factors making coups more likely. Moreover, previous research tends to group coups together regardless of whether they overthrew autocratic or democratically-elected leaders. I first show that coups overthrowing democratically elected leaders imply a very different kind of event than those overthrowing autocratic leaders. These differences relate to the implementation of authoritarian institutions following a coup in a democracy, which I discuss in several case studies. Second, I address the endogeneity of coups by comparing the growth consequences of failed and successful coup as well as matching and panel data methods, which yield similar results. Although coups taking place in already autocratic countries show imprecise and sometimes positive effects on economic growth, in democracies their effects are distinctly detrimental to growth. When overthrowing democratic leaders, coups not only fail to promote economic reforms or stop the occurrence of economic crises, but they also have substantial negative effects across a number of standard growth-related outcomes including health, education, and investment.
Read more: https://www.hhs.se/site
Arrangements by which influential firms receive economic favors, has been documented in numerous case studies but rarely formalized or analyzed quantitatively. We offer a formal voting model in which political influence is modeled as a contract by which politicians deliver a more preferential business environment to favored firms who, in exchange, protect politicians from the political consequences of high unemployment. From this perspective, cronyism simultaneously lowers a firm’s fixed costs while raising its variable wage costs. Testing several of the implications of the model on firm-level data from 26 transition countries, we find that more influential firms face fewer administrative and regulatory obstacles and carry bloated payrolls, but they also invest and innovate less. These results do not change when using propensity-score matching to adjust for the fact that influence is not randomly assigned.
How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, in the years before the genocide, regularly used for spreading political propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional
variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that an additional rainy Saturday resulted in a five percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence. These results pass a number of indirect tests of the exclusion restriction as well as other robustness checks and placebo tests.
This document analyzes survey data from over 40 developing countries to understand determinants of radicalism, support for violence, and participation in anti-regime actions. It finds that individuals who feel politically and economically marginalized are more likely to harbor extremist views but less likely to join collective political movements. This potentially explains why marginalized groups are difficult to mobilize in nation-wide movements, despite their attitudes. It also finds that arenas for active political participation are more likely dominated by upper-middle income groups committed to preserving the status quo. Suppressing these forms of participation may push these groups towards more radical preferences. The findings suggest the poor may be caught in a cycle of increasing self-exclusion and marginalization.
Dictatorships do not survive by repression alone. Rather, dictatorial rule is often explained as an ― authoritarian bargain by which citizens relinquish political rights for economic security. The applicability of the authoritarian bargain to decision-making in non-democratic states, however, has not been thoroughly examined. We conceptualize this bargain as a simple game between a representative citizen and an autocrat who faces the threat of insurrection, and where economic transfers and political influence are simultaneously determined. Our model yields precise implications for the empirical patterns that are expected to exist. Tests of a system of equations with panel data comprising 80 non-democratic states between 1975 and 1999 confirm the predictions of the authoritarian-bargain thesis, with some variation across different categories of dictatorship.
This dissertation examines whether refugee influxes into fragile democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa increase levels of xenophobia. It analyzes South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda as case studies. The literature review discusses research on the economic and social impacts of refugees on host communities and links between refugee presence and xenophobic behavior. The methodology section outlines a qualitative comparative case study approach. The structure previews chapters on refugee terms/trends in SSA, links between xenophobia/fragile states, economic impacts of refugees, roles of regional economic unions, and responses in the three case study countries.
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.
This document summarizes a study examining the characteristics and effects of political influence on firms in developing countries. The study finds that politically influential firms receive economic benefits like lower taxes and easier access to credit. However, these firms also provide benefits to politicians through maintaining higher employment levels and paying more taxes. While influential firms earn higher profits, they are less productive than non-influential firms and are less likely to invest or innovate due to restrictions on firing workers and unpredictable taxes imposed on them. Overall, the study suggests that political influence undermines firm performance and can prolong economic underdevelopment.
In this paper I examine the development effects of military coups. Whereas previous economic literature has primarily viewed coups as a form of broader political instability, less research has focused on its development consequences independent of the factors making coups more likely. Moreover, previous research tends to group coups together regardless of whether they overthrew autocratic or democratically-elected leaders. I first show that coups overthrowing democratically elected leaders imply a very different kind of event than those overthrowing autocratic leaders. These differences relate to the implementation of authoritarian institutions following a coup in a democracy, which I discuss in several case studies. Second, I address the endogeneity of coups by comparing the growth consequences of failed and successful coup as well as matching and panel data methods, which yield similar results. Although coups taking place in already autocratic countries show imprecise and sometimes positive effects on economic growth, in democracies their effects are distinctly detrimental to growth. When overthrowing democratic leaders, coups not only fail to promote economic reforms or stop the occurrence of economic crises, but they also have substantial negative effects across a number of standard growth-related outcomes including health, education, and investment.
Read more: https://www.hhs.se/site
Arrangements by which influential firms receive economic favors, has been documented in numerous case studies but rarely formalized or analyzed quantitatively. We offer a formal voting model in which political influence is modeled as a contract by which politicians deliver a more preferential business environment to favored firms who, in exchange, protect politicians from the political consequences of high unemployment. From this perspective, cronyism simultaneously lowers a firm’s fixed costs while raising its variable wage costs. Testing several of the implications of the model on firm-level data from 26 transition countries, we find that more influential firms face fewer administrative and regulatory obstacles and carry bloated payrolls, but they also invest and innovate less. These results do not change when using propensity-score matching to adjust for the fact that influence is not randomly assigned.
This document summarizes a research paper that examines the economic development effects of coups. It finds that coups overthrowing democratic governments have distinctly negative effects on economic growth, lowering GDP per capita by 1-1.3% per year over a decade. By contrast, coups in autocratic countries show smaller and imprecise positive effects. These results are robust across different empirical methods and not explained by alternative hypotheses. Additionally, coups reversing economic reforms, increasing debt, and reducing social spending, suggesting a shift in priorities away from the public.
This policy brief examines the timing of Turkey’s authoritarian turn using raw data measuring freedoms from the Freedom House (FH). It shows that Turkey’s authoritarian turn under the ruling AKP is not a recent phenomenon. Instead, the country’s institutional erosion – especially in terms of freedoms of expression and political pluralism – in fact began much earlier, and the losses in the earlier periods so far tend to dwarf those occurring later.
The document discusses the evolution of post-communist economic systems in Central and Eastern Europe and China over the past 25+ years. It argues that in Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism led to a process of disintegration of the communist state apparatus and competition between networks seeking to grab power and assets, resulting in weak institutions, corruption and kleptocracy. In contrast, China's transition involved the communist party consciously replacing central planning with market forces to maintain control. Accession to the EU helped strengthen institutions in some Central European countries.
Higher levels of economic segregation are associated with lower incomes, particularly for black residents. Higher levels of racial segregation are associated with lower incomes for blacks, lower educational attainment for whites and blacks, and lower levels of safety for all area residents.”
Although there exists a vast literature on aid efficiency (the effect of aid on GDP), and that aid allocation determinants have been estimated, little is known about the minute details of aid allocation. This article investigates empirically a claim repeatedly made in the past that aid donors herd. Building upon a methodology applied to financial markets, this article finds that aid donors herd similarly to portfolio funds on financial markets. It also estimates the causes of herding and finds that political transitions towards more autocratic regimes repel donors, but that transitions towards democracy have no effect. Finally, identified causes of herding explain little of its overall level, suggesting strategic motives play an important role.
Building Healthy Places: How are Community Development Organizations Contribu...Jonathan Dunnemann
Through a survey conducted by NeighborWorks America of 242 high-performing community development organizations across the United States, we examine health strategies, partnerships, and services delivered by community development
organizations and professionals.
In this paper we argue that aid effectiveness may suffer when partnerships with new regimes need to be established. We test this argument using the natural experiment of the break-up of communism in the former Eastern Bloc. We find that commercial and strategic concerns influenced both aid flows and the urgency of entry into new partnerships in the first half of the 1990s, while developmental objectives became more important only over time. These results hold up to a thorough sensitivity analysis, including using a gravity model to instrument for bilateral trade flows. We also find that aid fractionalization increased substantially, and that aid to the region was more likely to be tied, more volatile and less predictable than to aid to other recipients at the time. Overall, these results suggest that the guidelines for aid effectiveness agreed upon in the Paris Declaration are likely to be challenged by the current political transition in parts of the Arab world. Hopefully being aware of these challenges can help donors avoid making the same mistakes.
Arrangements by which politically connected firms receive economic favors are a common feature around the world, but little is known of the form or effects of influence in business-government relationships. We argue that influence not only brings significant privileges for selected firms, but requires firms to relinquish certain control rights in exchange for subsidies and protection. We show that, under these conditions, political influence can actually harm firm performance. Enterprise surveys from approximately 8,000 firms in 40 developing countries indicate that influential firms benefit from lower administrative and regulatory barriers (including bribe taxes), greater pricing power, and easier access to credit. But these firms also provide politically valuable benefits to incumbents through bloated payrolls and greater tax payments. These firms are also less likely to invest and innovate, and suffer from lower productivity than their non-influential counterparts. Our results highlight a potential channel by which cronyism leads to persistent underdevelopment.
Recent work on the so-called resource curse has focused on the importance of the interaction between institutional quality and resource abundance. The combination of low quality institutions and easily appropriable resources (such as oil and minerals) tend to be particularly bad for economic development. On the other hand, if institutions are good these same resources contribute more to economic growth than other types of natural wealth. While certainly pointing in the right direction this strand of literature leaves some open questions. First, it is vague on the precise channels through which institutional quality operates. Second, the empirical measures of institutions are often composite measures that arguably include measures of institutional outcomes rather than durable “rules of the game”. Using data for the period 1970-2003, this paper study the extent to which combinations of resource-types and constitutional setup determine the degree of appropriative activity in a country. Our results show that parliamentary regimes and majoritarian electoral systems are associated with less (or no) resource curse-effect than are presidential and proportional electoral systems. These effects are particularly strong in countries having much ores, metals and fuels.
By Jesper Roine (with A. Boschini and J. Pettersson), proceedings from "Meeting Global Challenges in Research Cooperation", Uppsala.
In this presentation, given at the end of this semester's CM443/743 class (New Media and Public Relations), I predict the end of the world, and whether social media will be the cause of it. I also create the "Societal Collapse Index," a score inspired by the HANDY model that is based on a country's EPI (Environmental Performance Index) and its World Bank Gini score. Based on their most recent EPI and Gini scores, the top five societies I predict the collapse of are: The Central African Republic, South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi.
This document summarizes a presentation on the economic transition of formerly socialist economies and the development of alternative institutions. It discusses how 25 years after transition, political institutions diverged more than economic institutions. It also presents analysis showing the density of connections between Russian business and political elites increased over time, and early connections were linked to greater business success, especially in oil industries. The analysis suggests alternative institutions like personal connections filled the gap when appropriate market institutions did not develop fully.
A place-conscious approach can strengthen integrated strategies in poor neigh...Jonathan Dunnemann
Ample research evidence establishes that conditions in severely depressed neighborhoods undermine both the quality of daily life and the long-term life chances of parents and children. Policymakers and practitioners working to improve well-being and economic mobility in poor neighborhoods generally agree on the need for integrated approaches.
This document discusses a study on the implications of fractionalization on economic development in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. It analyzes how fractionalization based on religion and ethnicity can increase corruption and hinder equal allocation of resources, posing an obstacle to development. Using panel data regression from 1990 to 2013, the study finds empirical evidence that fractionalization has contributed to hindering economic growth in the former Yugoslavian countries. It controls for factors like education, health, and income in line with recommendations of the Human Development Index.
This study examines the relationship between multilateral aid allocations from the OECD and levels of government respect for human rights from 1992-2001. Specifically, it tests two hypotheses: 1) That ODA has a direct positive effect on human rights scores, and 2) That ODA has an indirect effect on human rights by positively impacting regime type and economic development, which are known to positively impact human rights. The study uses data from the OECD, World Bank, Polity IV Project, and Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Data Set to conduct statistical analyses, including regression models. Preliminary results indicate that while regime type and economic development are positively associated with human rights, ODA allocations have a negative impact
Despite the fact that the global poverty rate has been halved since 2000, intensified efforts are required to boost the incomes, alleviate the suffering and build the resilience of those individuals still living in extreme poverty, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. Social protection systems need to be expanded and risks need to be mitigated for disaster-prone countries, which also tend to be the most impoverished. (Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, 2017)
The purpose of this short paper is to raise an argument that corruption plays a major role in preventing the world from achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), in this paper I particularly focus on corruption on poverty. This is also the same with the former Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that were never met.
Human rights in developing countries and its relationship with country’s econ...AI Publications
This document summarizes a research paper on the relationship between human rights and economic development in developing countries. The paper used a quantitative survey method with 149 valid responses to examine this relationship. The main finding was that there is a strong positive relationship between human rights protections and economic development in developing nations, supporting the research hypothesis. Human rights and economic development influence each other bidirectionally and there are various channels through which they may be linked, such as levels of democracy, political stability, and social policies.
Fractionalization alesinassrn fractionalizationEspi Sul
This document presents new measures of ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization for around 190 countries. It provides these measures to reexamine the relationship between fractionalization and economic growth and quality of institutions. The authors find that ethnic and linguistic fractionalization are negatively associated with growth and quality of government, while religious fractionalization shows no significant relationship or a slight positive one. The results depend on the specification used, and the variables are often highly correlated, making causal relationships difficult to determine precisely. Overall, the paper aims to provide more comprehensive fractionalization data and a nuanced analysis of the complex links between diversity and economic and political outcomes.
The document discusses the problems caused by inequality in Nepal. It argues that large income disparities inhibit the development of an effective public and divide society into two groups with different priorities. This undermines collective action on common problems and public resources. The author believes that no one should face destitution and all should have access to basic necessities. However, inequality persists in Nepal due to lack of strong leadership, prolonged political instability, and failure to develop the national economy.
RPA Spatial Planning and Inequality Fourth Regional Plan RoundtableJonathan Dunnemann
The document summarizes a briefing paper for a roundtable discussion on spatial planning and inequality in the New York metropolitan region. Some key points:
1) Income inequality in the region is at its highest in decades, with incomes declining for the bottom three-quarters of households since 1990 while rising for the top quarter. Poverty has also increased, especially in the suburbs.
2) The region has high levels of both economic and racial segregation. The percentage of lower-income residents living in majority lower-income neighborhoods has increased.
3) Past federal, state and local policies have often deepened inequality unintentionally, through practices like redlining and exclusionary zoning. Spatial planning choices around infrastructure,
2016 Citizen's Committee for Children of New York - Community Risk RankingJonathan Dunnemann
This document summarizes a report from the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York that ranks New York City's 59 community districts based on their level of risk to child well-being. It analyzes data across six domains - economic security, housing, health, education, youth, and family/community - to determine where risks are most concentrated. The highest risk districts tend to be in upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, and central Brooklyn. It provides the overall risk ranking and profiles two example districts - Hunts Point in the Bronx, which ranks as highest risk, and Murray Hill/Stuyvesant in Manhattan, which ranks as the lowest risk.
This document discusses green industrial policy in emerging countries, using renewable energy support in India and South Africa as examples. It argues that governments must shape markets through policies that create incentives for green investments while avoiding capture by special interests. Both India and South Africa successfully supported renewable energy through auction-based tariff systems that led to falling prices, increased investment, and growth in clean energy capacity. The lessons are that emerging countries need long-term credible strategies with learning from global best practices, competitive support mechanisms, and cooperation between the public and private sectors.
Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when services are procured rather than produced in-house. However, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009, including survival rates - our measure of non-contractible quality - and subjectively perceived quality of service. We estimate how procurement from private providers affects these measures using a difference-in-difference approach. The results indicate that procurement significantly increases non-contractible quality as measured by survival rate, reduces the cost per resident but does not affect subjectively perceived quality.
This document summarizes a research paper that examines the economic development effects of coups. It finds that coups overthrowing democratic governments have distinctly negative effects on economic growth, lowering GDP per capita by 1-1.3% per year over a decade. By contrast, coups in autocratic countries show smaller and imprecise positive effects. These results are robust across different empirical methods and not explained by alternative hypotheses. Additionally, coups reversing economic reforms, increasing debt, and reducing social spending, suggesting a shift in priorities away from the public.
This policy brief examines the timing of Turkey’s authoritarian turn using raw data measuring freedoms from the Freedom House (FH). It shows that Turkey’s authoritarian turn under the ruling AKP is not a recent phenomenon. Instead, the country’s institutional erosion – especially in terms of freedoms of expression and political pluralism – in fact began much earlier, and the losses in the earlier periods so far tend to dwarf those occurring later.
The document discusses the evolution of post-communist economic systems in Central and Eastern Europe and China over the past 25+ years. It argues that in Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism led to a process of disintegration of the communist state apparatus and competition between networks seeking to grab power and assets, resulting in weak institutions, corruption and kleptocracy. In contrast, China's transition involved the communist party consciously replacing central planning with market forces to maintain control. Accession to the EU helped strengthen institutions in some Central European countries.
Higher levels of economic segregation are associated with lower incomes, particularly for black residents. Higher levels of racial segregation are associated with lower incomes for blacks, lower educational attainment for whites and blacks, and lower levels of safety for all area residents.”
Although there exists a vast literature on aid efficiency (the effect of aid on GDP), and that aid allocation determinants have been estimated, little is known about the minute details of aid allocation. This article investigates empirically a claim repeatedly made in the past that aid donors herd. Building upon a methodology applied to financial markets, this article finds that aid donors herd similarly to portfolio funds on financial markets. It also estimates the causes of herding and finds that political transitions towards more autocratic regimes repel donors, but that transitions towards democracy have no effect. Finally, identified causes of herding explain little of its overall level, suggesting strategic motives play an important role.
Building Healthy Places: How are Community Development Organizations Contribu...Jonathan Dunnemann
Through a survey conducted by NeighborWorks America of 242 high-performing community development organizations across the United States, we examine health strategies, partnerships, and services delivered by community development
organizations and professionals.
In this paper we argue that aid effectiveness may suffer when partnerships with new regimes need to be established. We test this argument using the natural experiment of the break-up of communism in the former Eastern Bloc. We find that commercial and strategic concerns influenced both aid flows and the urgency of entry into new partnerships in the first half of the 1990s, while developmental objectives became more important only over time. These results hold up to a thorough sensitivity analysis, including using a gravity model to instrument for bilateral trade flows. We also find that aid fractionalization increased substantially, and that aid to the region was more likely to be tied, more volatile and less predictable than to aid to other recipients at the time. Overall, these results suggest that the guidelines for aid effectiveness agreed upon in the Paris Declaration are likely to be challenged by the current political transition in parts of the Arab world. Hopefully being aware of these challenges can help donors avoid making the same mistakes.
Arrangements by which politically connected firms receive economic favors are a common feature around the world, but little is known of the form or effects of influence in business-government relationships. We argue that influence not only brings significant privileges for selected firms, but requires firms to relinquish certain control rights in exchange for subsidies and protection. We show that, under these conditions, political influence can actually harm firm performance. Enterprise surveys from approximately 8,000 firms in 40 developing countries indicate that influential firms benefit from lower administrative and regulatory barriers (including bribe taxes), greater pricing power, and easier access to credit. But these firms also provide politically valuable benefits to incumbents through bloated payrolls and greater tax payments. These firms are also less likely to invest and innovate, and suffer from lower productivity than their non-influential counterparts. Our results highlight a potential channel by which cronyism leads to persistent underdevelopment.
Recent work on the so-called resource curse has focused on the importance of the interaction between institutional quality and resource abundance. The combination of low quality institutions and easily appropriable resources (such as oil and minerals) tend to be particularly bad for economic development. On the other hand, if institutions are good these same resources contribute more to economic growth than other types of natural wealth. While certainly pointing in the right direction this strand of literature leaves some open questions. First, it is vague on the precise channels through which institutional quality operates. Second, the empirical measures of institutions are often composite measures that arguably include measures of institutional outcomes rather than durable “rules of the game”. Using data for the period 1970-2003, this paper study the extent to which combinations of resource-types and constitutional setup determine the degree of appropriative activity in a country. Our results show that parliamentary regimes and majoritarian electoral systems are associated with less (or no) resource curse-effect than are presidential and proportional electoral systems. These effects are particularly strong in countries having much ores, metals and fuels.
By Jesper Roine (with A. Boschini and J. Pettersson), proceedings from "Meeting Global Challenges in Research Cooperation", Uppsala.
In this presentation, given at the end of this semester's CM443/743 class (New Media and Public Relations), I predict the end of the world, and whether social media will be the cause of it. I also create the "Societal Collapse Index," a score inspired by the HANDY model that is based on a country's EPI (Environmental Performance Index) and its World Bank Gini score. Based on their most recent EPI and Gini scores, the top five societies I predict the collapse of are: The Central African Republic, South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi.
This document summarizes a presentation on the economic transition of formerly socialist economies and the development of alternative institutions. It discusses how 25 years after transition, political institutions diverged more than economic institutions. It also presents analysis showing the density of connections between Russian business and political elites increased over time, and early connections were linked to greater business success, especially in oil industries. The analysis suggests alternative institutions like personal connections filled the gap when appropriate market institutions did not develop fully.
A place-conscious approach can strengthen integrated strategies in poor neigh...Jonathan Dunnemann
Ample research evidence establishes that conditions in severely depressed neighborhoods undermine both the quality of daily life and the long-term life chances of parents and children. Policymakers and practitioners working to improve well-being and economic mobility in poor neighborhoods generally agree on the need for integrated approaches.
This document discusses a study on the implications of fractionalization on economic development in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. It analyzes how fractionalization based on religion and ethnicity can increase corruption and hinder equal allocation of resources, posing an obstacle to development. Using panel data regression from 1990 to 2013, the study finds empirical evidence that fractionalization has contributed to hindering economic growth in the former Yugoslavian countries. It controls for factors like education, health, and income in line with recommendations of the Human Development Index.
This study examines the relationship between multilateral aid allocations from the OECD and levels of government respect for human rights from 1992-2001. Specifically, it tests two hypotheses: 1) That ODA has a direct positive effect on human rights scores, and 2) That ODA has an indirect effect on human rights by positively impacting regime type and economic development, which are known to positively impact human rights. The study uses data from the OECD, World Bank, Polity IV Project, and Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Data Set to conduct statistical analyses, including regression models. Preliminary results indicate that while regime type and economic development are positively associated with human rights, ODA allocations have a negative impact
Despite the fact that the global poverty rate has been halved since 2000, intensified efforts are required to boost the incomes, alleviate the suffering and build the resilience of those individuals still living in extreme poverty, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. Social protection systems need to be expanded and risks need to be mitigated for disaster-prone countries, which also tend to be the most impoverished. (Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, 2017)
The purpose of this short paper is to raise an argument that corruption plays a major role in preventing the world from achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), in this paper I particularly focus on corruption on poverty. This is also the same with the former Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that were never met.
Human rights in developing countries and its relationship with country’s econ...AI Publications
This document summarizes a research paper on the relationship between human rights and economic development in developing countries. The paper used a quantitative survey method with 149 valid responses to examine this relationship. The main finding was that there is a strong positive relationship between human rights protections and economic development in developing nations, supporting the research hypothesis. Human rights and economic development influence each other bidirectionally and there are various channels through which they may be linked, such as levels of democracy, political stability, and social policies.
Fractionalization alesinassrn fractionalizationEspi Sul
This document presents new measures of ethnic, linguistic, and religious fractionalization for around 190 countries. It provides these measures to reexamine the relationship between fractionalization and economic growth and quality of institutions. The authors find that ethnic and linguistic fractionalization are negatively associated with growth and quality of government, while religious fractionalization shows no significant relationship or a slight positive one. The results depend on the specification used, and the variables are often highly correlated, making causal relationships difficult to determine precisely. Overall, the paper aims to provide more comprehensive fractionalization data and a nuanced analysis of the complex links between diversity and economic and political outcomes.
The document discusses the problems caused by inequality in Nepal. It argues that large income disparities inhibit the development of an effective public and divide society into two groups with different priorities. This undermines collective action on common problems and public resources. The author believes that no one should face destitution and all should have access to basic necessities. However, inequality persists in Nepal due to lack of strong leadership, prolonged political instability, and failure to develop the national economy.
RPA Spatial Planning and Inequality Fourth Regional Plan RoundtableJonathan Dunnemann
The document summarizes a briefing paper for a roundtable discussion on spatial planning and inequality in the New York metropolitan region. Some key points:
1) Income inequality in the region is at its highest in decades, with incomes declining for the bottom three-quarters of households since 1990 while rising for the top quarter. Poverty has also increased, especially in the suburbs.
2) The region has high levels of both economic and racial segregation. The percentage of lower-income residents living in majority lower-income neighborhoods has increased.
3) Past federal, state and local policies have often deepened inequality unintentionally, through practices like redlining and exclusionary zoning. Spatial planning choices around infrastructure,
2016 Citizen's Committee for Children of New York - Community Risk RankingJonathan Dunnemann
This document summarizes a report from the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York that ranks New York City's 59 community districts based on their level of risk to child well-being. It analyzes data across six domains - economic security, housing, health, education, youth, and family/community - to determine where risks are most concentrated. The highest risk districts tend to be in upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, and central Brooklyn. It provides the overall risk ranking and profiles two example districts - Hunts Point in the Bronx, which ranks as highest risk, and Murray Hill/Stuyvesant in Manhattan, which ranks as the lowest risk.
This document discusses green industrial policy in emerging countries, using renewable energy support in India and South Africa as examples. It argues that governments must shape markets through policies that create incentives for green investments while avoiding capture by special interests. Both India and South Africa successfully supported renewable energy through auction-based tariff systems that led to falling prices, increased investment, and growth in clean energy capacity. The lessons are that emerging countries need long-term credible strategies with learning from global best practices, competitive support mechanisms, and cooperation between the public and private sectors.
Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when services are procured rather than produced in-house. However, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009, including survival rates - our measure of non-contractible quality - and subjectively perceived quality of service. We estimate how procurement from private providers affects these measures using a difference-in-difference approach. The results indicate that procurement significantly increases non-contractible quality as measured by survival rate, reduces the cost per resident but does not affect subjectively perceived quality.
This document describes an experiment that tests for the existence of purely procedural preferences in economic decision making. It introduces three allocation procedures - a dictator game, yes-no game, and ultimatum game - that yield the same expected outcomes but differ in their procedural properties. Dominant economic theories predict no preference between the procedures. The experiment found that some participants exhibited preferences over the procedures, suggesting people may care about the process independently of outcomes. It aims to understand the psychological reasons for purely procedural preferences by relating them to aspects of moral judgment.
This paper proposes a Transit Risk Index (TRI) designed to assess the riskiness of pipeline gas imports and to study the effect of introducing new gas routes. TRI controls for gas dependency, transit route diversification, political risks of transit, pipeline rupture probability, and the balance of power between supplying and consuming countries along the transit route. Evaluating TRI for the EU-Russia gas trade, we show that the introduction of the Nord Stream pipeline would further widen already large disparities in gas risk exposure across the EU Member States. The gas risk exposure of the Member States served by Nord Stream would decline. In contrast, EU countries not connected to Nord Stream, but sharing other Russian gas transit routes with the Nord Stream countries, would face greater gas risk exposure. We discuss the implications of our analysis for the design of the common energy policy in the EU.
Find more research papers at: https://www.hhs.se/site
Can television be used to teach and foster entrepreneurship among youth in developing countries? We report from a randomized control field experiment of an edutainment show on entrepreneurship broadcasted over almost three months on national television in Tanzania. The field experiment involved more than two thousand secondary school students, where the treatment group was incentivized to watch the edutainment show. We find short-term evidence of the edutainment show inspiring the viewers to become more interested in entrepreneurship and business and shaping non-cognitive traits such as risk- and time preferences, and long-term evidence of more business startups; in general, the treatment effects are more pronounced for the female viewers. However, we also find evidence that the encouragement of entrepreneurship discouraged investment in schooling; administrative data show a negative treatment effect on school performance and long-term survey data show that fewer treated students continue schooling.
When a government creates an agency to gather information relevant to policymaking, it faces two critical organizational questions: whether the agency should be given authority to
decide on policy or merely supply advice, and what should the policy goals of the agency be. Existing literature on the first question is unable to address the second, because the question
of authority becomes moot if the government can simply replicate its preferences within the agency. In contrast, this paper examines both questions within a model of policymaking under time inconsistency, a setting in which the government has a well-known incentive to create an agency with preferences that differ from its own. Thus, our framework permits a meaningful analysis of delegation versus communication with an endogenously chosen agent. The first main finding of the paper is that the government can do equally well with a strategic choice of agent, from which it solicits advice, instead of delegating authority, as long as the time inconsistency problem is not too severe. The second main finding is that the government may strictly prefer seeking advice to delegating authority if there is prior uncertainty with respect to what is the optimal policy.
By Anders Olofsgård (with R. Luma), published in Journal of Public Economics.
We investigate whether the onset of a sovereign default is associated with an increase in the probability that incumbent politicians lose office. We construct a novel dataset of finance ministers tenure and turnover for 84 countries between 1980 and 2012. We find robust evidence that sovereign default onsets are associated with statistically and economically significant increases in the probability of finance minister turnover. The evidence regarding chief executive turnover is mixed. Our findings suggest that sovereign defaults may have political consequences, which have important implications for the analysis of default, ex ante borrowing subject to the risk of default, and the design of ex post interventions.
Read more at https://www.hhs.se/site
In many organizations, decisions are taken by unanimity giving each member veto power. We analyze a model of an organization in which members with heterogenous productivity privately contribute to a common good. Under unanimity, the least efficient member imposes her preferred effort choice on the entire organization. The threat of forming an "inner organization" can undermine the veto power of the less efficient members and coerce them to exert more effort. We also identify the conditions under which the threat of forming an inner organization is executed. Finally, we show that majority rules effectively prevent the emergence of inner organizations.
Version of July 2009.
Read more research publications at: https://www.hhs.se/site
This document summarizes an experimental study that compares cooperation levels in public goods games with a finite versus probabilistic number of rounds. In the study, subjects participated in repeated sequences of linear public goods games with varying group sizes and payout rates. The researchers found that while overall cooperation rates were similar between the finite and probabilistic conditions, cooperation decreased more sharply in the final round of finite sequences. Cooperation levels generally increased with higher payout rates and larger group sizes, consistent with previous research. The study contributes new evidence on how experience and uncertainty about round length affects cooperation in repeated public goods games.
The document summarizes the results of a randomized controlled trial evaluating the impact of introducing biometric smartcards for authenticating payments in India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and Social Security Pension (SSP) programs. Key findings include:
- Implementation of smartcards was meaningful (around 50%) but not complete.
- Smartcards led to a faster (29% quicker), less time-consuming (20% reduction in time spent), and more predictable (39% more predictable) NREGS payments process.
- There were substantial reductions in leakage for both programs: 12.7 percentage point reduction (around 41%) for NREGS and 2.8 percentage point reduction (around 47
The rapid growth of the US financial sector has driven policy debate on whether it is socially desirable. I propose a heterogeneous agent model with asymmetric information and matching frictions that produces a tradeoff between finance and entrepreneurship. By becoming bankers, talented individuals efficiently match investors with entrepreneurs, but do not internalize the negative effect on the pool of talented entrepreneurs. Thus, the financial sector is inefficiently large in equilibrium, and this inefficiency increases with wealth inequality. The model explains the simultaneous growth of wealth inequality and finance in the US, and why more unequal countries have larger financial sectors.
by Kirill Shakhnov, EUI †
JOB MARKET PAPER
First version: January 2015
This version: November 2014
Read more: https://www.hhs.se/site
This study evaluates the impact of a food for education program implemented in Cambodia between 1999-2003. The program provided in-school meals, take-home rations for girls, and de-worming programs. The study finds the program increased school enrollment between 5-14% depending on the type of intervention, with the largest effect from the full package of in-school meals, take-home rations, and de-worming. The program was estimated to cost $85 per additional child enrolled per year, making it very cost-effective compared to similar programs.
This article explores the link between productive relational contracts and corruption. Responsibility for a contract is delegated to a supervisor who cares about both production and kickbacks, neither of which are explicitly contractible. We characterize the optimal supervisor-agent relational contract and show that the relationship between joint surplus, kickbacks and production is nonmonotonic. Delegation may benefit the principal when relational contracting is difficult by easing the time inconsistency problem of paying incentive payments. For the principal, the optimal supervisor has incentives that are partially, but not completely, aligned with her own.
Read more at: https://www.hhs.se/site
Comments by Ina Ganguli on paper "Is Corruption Good for your Health?" presented by Guilherme Lichand at the SITE Corruption Conference, 31 August 2015.
Find more at: https://www.hhs.se/site
This year marks the 25-year anniversary of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have tread the transition process towards market economies, open and democratic political systems, and strong and independent judicial institutions at very different paces. This year's Development Day will be held on May 27 at the Stockholm School of Economics. The theme of the day-long conference is "Traces of transition: Unfinished business 25 years down the road?".
As in previous years the event is organized jointly by SITE and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The day will feature a mix of international scholars and practitioners from the public, private and civil society sectors. We invite you to read more about the conference topic, speakers and panelists below on conference program.
This year's SITE Energy Day was devoted to discussing the consequences of oil price fluctuations for markets and actors of the economy. The half-day conference engaged policy-oriented scholars and experts from the business community to discuss the impact of oil price fluctuations on macro fundamentals, international trade, strategies of oil cartels, strategic risk management, and opportunities for change in energy systems.
Torbjörn Becker, Director of SITE, gave a talk "The volatility of oil price forecasts and its macroeconomic implications"
For more information and research analysis please visit: www.hhs.se/site
In this paper we deal with the relationship between external donors and village organizations (VOs) in Western Sub-Saharan Africa. We utilize a large dataset of village organizations in rural areas of Senegal and Burkina Faso. We argue that the kind of relationship established with northern donors may have effects on the governance mechanisms of the village organization. We investigate to what extent differences in the foundation of the VO and of the partnership with the external donor can partially explain outcomes and membership structures of the VO itself. Our results go in the direction of possible diverging effects of a donor intervention in the village organization, according to the degree of proactivity and initiative that the VO
displays.
Authors: Cecilia Navarra, University of Namur, CRED, Rempart de la Vierge, 8, 5000 Namur, Belgium. Elena Vallino, University of Torino, Department of Economics and Statistics, Lungo Dora Siena 100/A, 10153 Torino, Italy.
The contributions of community based volunteer workforce towards the millenni...Alexander Decker
This document summarizes a study on the contributions of community-based volunteers towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Nyando District, Kenya. The study found that volunteers provided services relevant to goals around poverty, education, health, and the environment. Specifically, volunteers offered training in agriculture, income generation, and education. They also supported health services. Most volunteers spent 6-10 hours per week providing these unpaid services. The estimated financial value of their contributions was equivalent to 4% of the district's budget for development. The majority of volunteers had served for over 5 years, indicating retention of volunteers over time. Due to budget constraints, volunteerism provides an alternative means of delivering important social services.
This paper examines the institutional and political constraints that
inhibit multilateral and bilateral donor agencies supporting poverty reduction
initiatives on the ground. These include the constraints related to their own structures
and the political systems in which they are embedded, and those related to
their relationships with recipient governments. The paper also considers how
current trends in development assistance towards greater donor harmonization
and the associated processes within Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), the
shift from project support to budget support, and the drive for greater “efficiency”
may further limit donors’ capacity to support pro-poor local initiatives. It also
discusses how these trends in development assistance are marginalizing support
for those aspects of development that require relatively little external funding but
also require that this funding be used carefully and strategically, engaging directly
with poor groups and their organizations, and enlarging their scope for influence
and action.
This document discusses community of practices and learning through case studies. It begins with introducing the concept of community of practices and how knowledge is shared within and between communities. It then presents a case study of Meghanwas village in Haryana where a community initiative to save water through awareness campaigns led to knowledge sharing within the village and neighboring villages adopting similar practices. The document further discusses elements, types, models and spread of knowledge in community of practices using the example of Sidhbari village in Himachal Pradesh where self-help groups engage in livelihood, health, and economic activities through knowledge sharing within and collaboration with outside organizations.
It’s basically about the rural and infrastructure development of a rural areas through which we can know about the life ,education ,and earning in rural areas is how much difficult.
Women’s Rights & Gender Equality, the New Aid Environment and Civil Society ...Dr Lendy Spires
This document summarizes a research report on the implications of changing aid structures for organizations working on gender equality and women's rights. It finds that new aid modalities like budget support and pooled funding are often not prioritizing gender and may marginalize smaller organizations focused on women's empowerment. While some donors have enabled influencing work on gender policies, funding is becoming shorter-term and less supportive of core costs. The report highlights the diverse experiences of organizations and need for more monitoring of aid impacts on the civil society sector.
This document summarizes a research report on the implications of changing aid structures for organizations working on gender equality and women's rights. It finds that new aid modalities like budget support and pooled funding are often not prioritizing gender and may marginalize smaller organizations focused on women's empowerment. While some donors have enabled influencing work on gender policies, funding is becoming shorter-term and less supportive of core costs. The report highlights the diverse experiences of organizations and need for more monitoring of aid impacts on the civil society sector.
This study focused on the relationship between resource
capacity and performance of local community organizations in Bureti Sub County. Organizational capacity has gained interest especially as it relates to performance of community organizations.Community organizations provide avenues for its members to improve their lives through their participation, however the potential contributions of these organizations to community development has been limited by low organizational capacity among these organizations to effectively deliver services and meet their objectives. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of resources and skills on performance of local community organizations. The general systems theoryguided this study. The study sample was drawn from local community based organizations registered in Bureti Sub County; stratified sampling was used to select community organizations from which 100 members from the sampled organizations were randomly selected and 5 technical
officers. Data was collected through interview method with both open and close ended questions. Data was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively,quantitative analysis used the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) computer software to generate frequencies and percentages which were interpreted and discussed in line with the study objectives. Qualitative data were analyzed thematically to provide in-depth explanations. This current study found a significant and positive relationship between resource capacity and performance of community organizations, but found no strong relationship between skills capacity and performance. These findings suggest that improved resource capacity would lead to better performance of local organizations. Recommendations to practitioners and policy makers are that efforts should be directed at improving the overall organizational capacity of community organizations in order to raise their performance and the benefits to the members and the community. This study is expected to contribute to the body of knowledge on the relationship between organizational capacity and performance of community organizations.
Week 3Social vulnerability to disaster myth of community, gen.docxjessiehampson
Week 3
Social vulnerability to disaster: myth of community, gender, and ethnicity
Last week what did we discuss?
The theories about disasters
The dominant paradigm and criticisms of it
The alternative model: political ecology
PAR model
This week we will discuss
Disaster justice
Social vulnerability to disasters:
Myth of community
Causes of differences in social vulnerability:
Gender
Race/ethnicity
Others
Culture and vulnerability
Disaster justice
Linkages to Environmental Justice
Hillman (2006, 695) explains that “environment justice as a political movement and research programme originated amidst concerns over the unjust distribution of environmental hazards primarily in, or close to, disadvantaged or marginalised communities.”
Most scholars trace the origin of the environmental justice movement to a protest in 1982 against the dumping of PCB-laden dirt into a waste landfill in Warren County, North Carolina. The county was 65 percent Black.
This protest marked one of the first times when civil rights and environmental groups collaborated. Studies in the 1980s and early 1990s which demonstrated linkages between not only environmental risk, namely the location of toxic waste sites, waste dumps, and power plants, and poverty but also between environmental risk and race in the US further empowered these activists,
Also, only starting in the 1990s, has the environmental justice framework been applied outside of the United States.
It is still not widely used in Asia as a framework academically but there are increasing movements for environmental justice (e.g. in China, Vietnam, and Thailand)
Regardless, of the location, as Schroeder et al. (2008) assert, at the core of environmental justice struggles are universal and part of broader patterns of injustice of a global significance.
Schlosberg’s 3 types of injustices
What are they?
distributive (how environmental goods and harms are unevenly distributed)
procedural (whether different groups have equal access to decision-making)
lack of recognition (whether groups have been discriminated against due to their identity).
2 key questions
1) what patterns of social inequality exist in relation to the environmental good or bad?
This question is a distributional one in which a contextual process claim of injustice is being made.
Such a claim analyses a specific situation, such as the distribution of floodwater in Bangkok in 2011, and historically traces patterns of urban development and decision-making and how these patterns produced injustices.
Questions that also need to be asked are how inequalities are being produced, who is responsible for them, how decisions have been made have, and how are government policies and practices created and enacted
2) The second series of questions are procedural ones, examining how a society operates: how power is distributed, and how uneven environmental outcomes arise as a consequence?
A basic insight of the movement is that “distribution o ...
The document discusses several studies on self-help groups (SHGs) in various contexts:
- Ekott George (2012) analyzed how the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced a "Self-Help Groups Linkage Programme" in 1991 to improve lending under an agricultural credit guarantee scheme by having groups save regularly and take loans from partner banks.
- Codd Helen (2011) explored the benefits of SHGs for women coping with a partner's imprisonment, drawing on perspectives from criminal justice, family theory, and gender studies.
- Krishnan Lata (2010) examined how SHGs in India helped empower underprivileged women economically and socially through microfinance and a sense of unity.
- Eliana La
This document discusses funding challenges faced by women's organizations. It summarizes recent research finding that while some local women's organizations have received increased funding for areas like reducing violence against women and HIV/AIDS, the majority are struggling to secure funds and sustain core activities. Only a small percentage reported increased funding since 2000. Additionally, most women's organizations are small with annual budgets under $50,000, and over half are receiving less funding than in 2000 while facing greater difficulties fundraising. The document aims to provide innovative funding ideas to strengthen the roles of women's organizations in development.
Identification of the effects of micro-credits on different aspects of the li...inventionjournals
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention (IJHSSI) is an international journal intended for professionals and researchers in all fields of Humanities and Social Science. IJHSSI publishes research articles and reviews within the whole field Humanities and Social Science, new teaching methods, assessment, validation and the impact of new technologies and it will continue to provide information on the latest trends and developments in this ever-expanding subject. The publications of papers are selected through double peer reviewed to ensure originality, relevance, and readability. The articles published in our journal can be accessed online.
Agriculture Cooperatives’ Contribution to Improvement of Community Life in Pa...jo bitonio
This document summarizes a study on the contributions of agriculture cooperatives to improving community life in Pangasinan, Philippines. The study examined 13 cooperatives and found they provide various social and economic interventions. Socially, they offer scholarships, capacity building, medical services, and insurance. Economically, they provide grocery stores, employment, and livelihood training. The cooperatives contribute to communities by being adaptable, effective, significant, financially viable, and sustainable. They empower marginalized groups like women by providing capital and business opportunities. The study concludes cooperatives play a crucial role in local social and economic development through their various interventions. It recommends strengthening monitoring, developing comprehensive plans, and forging partnerships to help cooperatives better support
The Positive Impacts Of Community Development In South AfricaChristina Valadez
Community development in South Africa can have positive impacts in fields like public health, economic development, and reducing violence. It aims to improve solidarity and empower communities through principles like self-help, participation, and addressing felt needs. However, locality alone does not define a community - development must pursue the goals of agency and solidarity. Previous research found community development and gardening programs can revitalize neighborhoods by reclaiming urban areas, fostering social ties, and increasing civic engagement.
The purpose of this paper is to point out the unique features and outcomes of the Dane County Long Term Support System, to clearly identify and explain the cause-and-effect dynamics which underlie Dane's success, and to raise important questions to be addressed by key stakeholders and the State of Wisconsin during the period leading up to Dane's Transition to Family Care and IRIS in 2018.
The document discusses factors that affect recovery after natural disasters, using examples from Aceh, Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami. It finds that:
1) Massive aid can help rebuild physical capital like housing quickly but also introduces outside influences that change village life.
2) Aid was largely uncoordinated, with many NGOs competing and little oversight, affecting recovery trajectories across villages.
3) The type of aid agency, whether it was also the donor or just an implementer, affected the quality and sustainability of rebuilding efforts and level of community participation.
4) Introducing elections for village heads after the disaster shifted power from elites and was correlated with less community volunteerism in rebuilding
Opportunity Nation Civic Engagement Report 2014Alyssa Meza
This document summarizes research on the relationship between civic engagement and economic opportunity. It finds that civic engagement, particularly volunteering and participation in civic/service organizations, is correlated with positive individual and community outcomes. Specifically, the research found that youth who volunteer are less likely to be disconnected from school and work. It also found civic engagement is a predictor of greater economic opportunity across states, and that areas with higher volunteerism tend to have lower income inequality. The research aims to provide evidence that civic engagement can help build skills and social networks that promote upward mobility and stronger communities.
This report summarizes the findings of a community assessment in Waitakere, New Zealand conducted by Community Waitakere between October 2012 and March 2013. Over 160 individuals representing 74 organizations provided input. The assessment identified strengths, aspirations, needs and opportunities in the community sector. Key strengths included strong networks and the contributions of people working in the sector. Aspirations centered on more stable funding, collaboration, and recognition of community development. Needs included better representation of diverse groups and leadership development. The assessment provides insights to guide Community Waitakere's strategy and support the broader community sector.
Presented by Anastasia Luzgina during the conference "Belarus at the crossroads: The complex role of sanctions in the context of totalitarian backsliding" on April 23, 2024.
Presented by Erlend Bollman Bjørtvedt during the conference "Belarus at the crossroads: The complex role of sanctions in the context of totalitarian backsliding" on April 23, 2024.
Presented by Dzimtry Kruk during the conference "Belarus at the crossroads: The complex role of sanctions in the context of totalitarian backsliding" on April 23, 2024.
Presented by Lev Lvovskiy during the conference "Belarus at the crossroads: The complex role of sanctions in the context of totalitarian backsliding" on April 23, 2024.
Presented by Chloé Le Coq, Professor of Economics, University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas, Economics and Law Research Center (CRED), during SITE 2023 Development Day conference.
This year’s SITE Development Day conference will focus on the Russian war on Ukraine. We will discuss the situation in Ukraine and neighbouring countries, how to finance and organize financial support within the EU and within Sweden, and how to deal with the current energy crisis.
This year’s SITE Development Day conference will focus on the Russian war on Ukraine. We will discuss the situation in Ukraine and neighbouring countries, how to finance and organize financial support within the EU and within Sweden, and how to deal with the current energy crisis.
The document provides an agenda for an event titled "#AcademicsStandWithUkraine" being held on December 6, 2022 in Stockholm, Sweden. The day-long event will feature discussions on supporting Ukraine, the EU response, and the energy crisis, with panels including representatives from Ukrainian and European universities and organizations, as well as the Swedish and European governments. Speakers will discuss fiscal policy in Ukraine, Swedish and EU support for Ukraine, and the regional impact of the war.
The (Ce)² Workshop is organised as an initiative of the FREE Network by one of its members, the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA, Poland) together with the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP, UK). This will be the seventh edition of the workshop which will be held in Warsaw on 27-28 June 2022.
The (Ce)2 workshop is organised as an initiative of the FREE Network by one of its members, the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA, Poland) together with the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP, UK). This will be the seventh edition of the workshop which will be held in Warsaw on 27-28 June 2022.
The (Ce)2 workshop is organised as an initiative of the FREE Network by one of its members, the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA, Poland) together with the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP, UK). This will be the seventh edition of the workshop which will be held in Warsaw on 27-28 June 2022.
The (Ce)2 workshop is organised as an initiative of the FREE Network by one of its members, the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA, Poland) together with the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP, UK). This will be the seventh edition of the workshop which will be held in Warsaw on 27-28 June 2022.
Solution Manual For Financial Accounting, 8th Canadian Edition 2024, by Libby...Donc Test
Solution Manual For Financial Accounting, 8th Canadian Edition 2024, by Libby, Hodge, Verified Chapters 1 - 13, Complete Newest Version Solution Manual For Financial Accounting, 8th Canadian Edition by Libby, Hodge, Verified Chapters 1 - 13, Complete Newest Version Solution Manual For Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Pdf Chapters Download Stuvia Solution Manual For Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Ebook Download Stuvia Solution Manual For Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Pdf Solution Manual For Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Pdf Download Stuvia Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Pdf Chapters Download Stuvia Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Ebook Download Stuvia Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Pdf Financial Accounting 8th Canadian Edition Pdf Download Stuvia
New Visa Rules for Tourists and Students in Thailand | Amit Kakkar Easy VisaAmit Kakkar
Discover essential details about Thailand's recent visa policy changes, tailored for tourists and students. Amit Kakkar Easy Visa provides a comprehensive overview of new requirements, application processes, and tips to ensure a smooth transition for all travelers.
"Does Foreign Direct Investment Negatively Affect Preservation of Culture in the Global South? Case Studies in Thailand and Cambodia."
Do elements of globalization, such as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), negatively affect the ability of countries in the Global South to preserve their culture? This research aims to answer this question by employing a cross-sectional comparative case study analysis utilizing methods of difference. Thailand and Cambodia are compared as they are in the same region and have a similar culture. The metric of difference between Thailand and Cambodia is their ability to preserve their culture. This ability is operationalized by their respective attitudes towards FDI; Thailand imposes stringent regulations and limitations on FDI while Cambodia does not hesitate to accept most FDI and imposes fewer limitations. The evidence from this study suggests that FDI from globally influential countries with high gross domestic products (GDPs) (e.g. China, U.S.) challenges the ability of countries with lower GDPs (e.g. Cambodia) to protect their culture. Furthermore, the ability, or lack thereof, of the receiving countries to protect their culture is amplified by the existence and implementation of restrictive FDI policies imposed by their governments.
My study abroad in Bali, Indonesia, inspired this research topic as I noticed how globalization is changing the culture of its people. I learned their language and way of life which helped me understand the beauty and importance of cultural preservation. I believe we could all benefit from learning new perspectives as they could help us ideate solutions to contemporary issues and empathize with others.
Discover the Future of Dogecoin with Our Comprehensive Guidance36 Crypto
Learn in-depth about Dogecoin's trajectory and stay informed with 36crypto's essential and up-to-date information about the crypto space.
Our presentation delves into Dogecoin's potential future, exploring whether it's destined to skyrocket to the moon or face a downward spiral. In addition, it highlights invaluable insights. Don't miss out on this opportunity to enhance your crypto understanding!
https://36crypto.com/the-future-of-dogecoin-how-high-can-this-cryptocurrency-reach/
A toxic combination of 15 years of low growth, and four decades of high inequality, has left Britain poorer and falling behind its peers. Productivity growth is weak and public investment is low, while wages today are no higher than they were before the financial crisis. Britain needs a new economic strategy to lift itself out of stagnation.
Scotland is in many ways a microcosm of this challenge. It has become a hub for creative industries, is home to several world-class universities and a thriving community of businesses – strengths that need to be harness and leveraged. But it also has high levels of deprivation, with homelessness reaching a record high and nearly half a million people living in very deep poverty last year. Scotland won’t be truly thriving unless it finds ways to ensure that all its inhabitants benefit from growth and investment. This is the central challenge facing policy makers both in Holyrood and Westminster.
What should a new national economic strategy for Scotland include? What would the pursuit of stronger economic growth mean for local, national and UK-wide policy makers? How will economic change affect the jobs we do, the places we live and the businesses we work for? And what are the prospects for cities like Glasgow, and nations like Scotland, in rising to these challenges?
Falcon stands out as a top-tier P2P Invoice Discounting platform in India, bridging esteemed blue-chip companies and eager investors. Our goal is to transform the investment landscape in India by establishing a comprehensive destination for borrowers and investors with diverse profiles and needs, all while minimizing risk. What sets Falcon apart is the elimination of intermediaries such as commercial banks and depository institutions, allowing investors to enjoy higher yields.
Abhay Bhutada, the Managing Director of Poonawalla Fincorp Limited, is an accomplished leader with over 15 years of experience in commercial and retail lending. A Qualified Chartered Accountant, he has been pivotal in leveraging technology to enhance financial services. Starting his career at Bank of India, he later founded TAB Capital Limited and co-founded Poonawalla Finance Private Limited, emphasizing digital lending. Under his leadership, Poonawalla Fincorp achieved a 'AAA' credit rating, integrating acquisitions and emphasizing corporate governance. Actively involved in industry forums and CSR initiatives, Abhay has been recognized with awards like "Young Entrepreneur of India 2017" and "40 under 40 Most Influential Leader for 2020-21." Personally, he values mindfulness, enjoys gardening, yoga, and sees every day as an opportunity for growth and improvement.
Fabular Frames and the Four Ratio ProblemMajid Iqbal
Digital, interactive art showing the struggle of a society in providing for its present population while also saving planetary resources for future generations. Spread across several frames, the art is actually the rendering of real and speculative data. The stereographic projections change shape in response to prompts and provocations. Visitors interact with the model through speculative statements about how to increase savings across communities, regions, ecosystems and environments. Their fabulations combined with random noise, i.e. factors beyond control, have a dramatic effect on the societal transition. Things get better. Things get worse. The aim is to give visitors a new grasp and feel of the ongoing struggles in democracies around the world.
Stunning art in the small multiples format brings out the spatiotemporal nature of societal transitions, against backdrop issues such as energy, housing, waste, farmland and forest. In each frame we see hopeful and frightful interplays between spending and saving. Problems emerge when one of the two parts of the existential anaglyph rapidly shrinks like Arctic ice, as factors cross thresholds. Ecological wealth and intergenerational equity areFour at stake. Not enough spending could mean economic stress, social unrest and political conflict. Not enough saving and there will be climate breakdown and ‘bankruptcy’. So where does speculative design start and the gambling and betting end? Behind each fabular frame is a four ratio problem. Each ratio reflects the level of sacrifice and self-restraint a society is willing to accept, against promises of prosperity and freedom. Some values seem to stabilise a frame while others cause collapse. Get the ratios right and we can have it all. Get them wrong and things get more desperate.
OJP data from firms like Vicinity Jobs have emerged as a complement to traditional sources of labour demand data, such as the Job Vacancy and Wages Survey (JVWS). Ibrahim Abuallail, PhD Candidate, University of Ottawa, presented research relating to bias in OJPs and a proposed approach to effectively adjust OJP data to complement existing official data (such as from the JVWS) and improve the measurement of labour demand.
South Dakota State University degree offer diploma Transcriptynfqplhm
办理美国SDSU毕业证书制作南达科他州立大学假文凭定制Q微168899991做SDSU留信网教留服认证海牙认证改SDSU成绩单GPA做SDSU假学位证假文凭高仿毕业证GRE代考如何申请南达科他州立大学South Dakota State University degree offer diploma Transcript
[4:55 p.m.] Bryan Oates
OJPs are becoming a critical resource for policy-makers and researchers who study the labour market. LMIC continues to work with Vicinity Jobs’ data on OJPs, which can be explored in our Canadian Job Trends Dashboard. Valuable insights have been gained through our analysis of OJP data, including LMIC research lead
Suzanne Spiteri’s recent report on improving the quality and accessibility of job postings to reduce employment barriers for neurodivergent people.
Decoding job postings: Improving accessibility for neurodivergent job seekers
Improving the quality and accessibility of job postings is one way to reduce employment barriers for neurodivergent people.
Using Online job postings and survey data to understand labour market trends
Can the Poor Be Organized?
1. Can the Poor Be Organized?
Cooperation and Public Goods in Rural India*
Raj M. Desai†
Shareen Joshi‡
Anders Olofsgård§
February 2014
Abstract
High coordination costs are often identified as the reason for the low quality of public goods
available to the poor. We report findings from a unique combination of a village-randomized
controlled trial and a lab-in-the-field experiment. An in-depth survey of 1,600 women before and
after an intervention establishing membership-based organizations in one of the poorest districts in
India shows that the presence of these groups increased villagers’ capacity to address water
delivery problems, and improved access to, and quality of, water service. Public goods games with
over 200 participants in a subset of control and treatment villages show that the presence of village
groups increased cooperation among both members and non-members in treated villages. We find
little evidence that cooperation is facilitated by more common tastes among group members.
These results suggest that, in contrast to traditional community development programs,
membership groups can help poor communities build social capital.
*
We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and, in
particular, the assistance of Reema Nanavaty, Varsha Bhatt, as well as the SEWA facilitators and group leaders in
Dungarpur district, without whom this research would have not been possible. The Development and Governance
Initiative at the Brookings Institution, Georgetown University’s “Engaging India” Initiative, and the Swedish
Research Council provided financial support. Previous versions of this paper were presented at: annual meetings of
the American Economic Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Association of Swedish
Development Economists; the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium and the Symposium on
Economic Experiments in Developing Countries; and seminars at the World Bank, 3ie (New Delhi), Georgetown
University, the National Council for Applied Economic Research, the Indian Statistical Institute, and the Stockholm
School of Economics. The authors are grateful to Christine Zhang for research assistance, and to the following for
comments on previous drafts: Chloé Le Coq, Nada Eissa, James Habyarimana, Karla Hoff, Billy Jack, Hari
Nagarajan, Irfan Nooruddin, Carlo Prato, Vijayendra Rao, Martin Ravallion, and E. Somanathan.
†
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of Government, Georgetown University, and The
Brookings Institution (desair@georgetown.edu).
‡
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University (sj244@georgetown.edu).
§
Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (anders.olofsgard@hhs.se).
2. 1
A defining feature of poor communities is their limited capacity for collective action.
Early assessments of political society—as detailed in Durkheim’s concept of “mechanical
solidarity” (1947 [1893]) or in Weber’s description of “patrimonialism” (1968)—argued that
where social ties are dominated by kinship, clan, or tribe, political life is characterized by the
absence of coordinated behavior—what Banfield described as the problem of “concerting the
behavior of large numbers of people in matters of public concern” (1958: 8). Recent writings
have lamented the dearth of social capital in poor areas, and confirmed that the endemic factors
associated with poverty can steeply raise coordination costs (Woolcock and Narayan 2000).
Without coordination, the bargaining position of the poor relative to public officials,
middlemen, and frontline service-delivery agents is weakened (World Bank 2004; Banerjee, Iyer
and Somanathan 2007). The result is that the quality, accessibility, and reliability of public
services is almost uniformly worse for the poor, who are forced to rely on them almost
exclusively (Devarajan and Reinikka 2004; DFID 2010).
Efforts have been underway for several years to increase coordination among the poor as
a means of improving public goods. International donors, in particular, have sought to expand
their support for “community-driven development” (CDD) projects that encourage the poor
jointly to design, deliver, maintain, and monitor local public goods. The record of CDD
initiatives in fostering cooperation, however, is mixed, with the balance of recent evidence
showing that any behavioral changes among the poor do not last long.
We examine a related local institution, namely, the “self-help” group—a grassroots,
membership-based organization that combines elements of classic rotating credit and savings
associations with various other group-related activities, and whose effects have been relatively
less explored (Chen, et al. 2007). There are compelling reasons to evaluate how the quality and
3. 2
accessibility of local public goods are influenced by grassroots efforts such as self-help groups,
which, in contrast to typical CDD initiatives, are typically focused on organizing the poor for a
broader range of purposes beyond the implementation of specific projects.
Our investigation takes place in rural India, where we examine the ability of women to
coordinate with respect to a public good that dramatically affects their quality of life: water. We
exploit the random selection of villages for a self-help group program implemented in Rajasthan,
the water-scarcest state in the Indian union. Although self-help groups were not established to
address problems of water scarcity (or any other specific public goods problem), we postulate
that the mutual trust and solidarity acquired in one domain (credit and savings) effectively
translates into group cooperation along a number of other fronts. Residents of the region where
the program was rolled out, moreover, are mostly from “scheduled tribes”—historically among
the least mobilized groups in the Indian polity. Recruitment of these women into self-help groups
can provide a strong-inference test of the capacity of grassroots movements to organize
marginalized groups, and in so doing, improve accountability and quality with respect to public
goods delivery.
We find three principal village-level effects. First, residents of villages where self-help
groups were started acquire greater knowledge of how to address problems of water supply and
water deficiency. Second, women in self-help group villages are more likely to contact local
authorities regarding their grievances with respect to water service. Third, residents of self-help
group villages report greater improvements in water access and infrastructure compared to their
counterparts in control villages. We find that all of these effects are common to all residents in
self-help group villages suggesting strong spillovers from members to non-members in villages
were these groups were established.
4. 3
Survey data suggest that the intervention resulted in both absolute and relative
improvements in water services. The extent to which this is driven by increased cooperation,
however, requires a better understanding of the channels by which self-help group membership
may have enabled village residents to coordinate for improvements in water infrastructure. To
test whether the presence of self-help groups fostered norms of cooperation we conducted a
series of repeated public-goods games with both self-help group members and non-members in a
sub-set of treatment and control villages. We find that self-help group members initially
contribute significantly more than non-members. Thereafter, inter-village differences (between
residents of treatment and control villages) dominate intra-village differences (between members
and non-members within treatment villages), suggesting that learning takes place in subsequent
rounds, and that non-members quickly become conditional cooperators. An alternative
explanation is that self-help group members moved toward common preferences regarding
public goods. Pre- and post-intervention concordances among groups within treatment and
control villages do not support this argument.
We make two substantive contributions. First, we add to a small but growing body of
evaluations using combinations of randomized-controlled trials (RCT) and lab-in-the-field
techniques to understand better the underlying mechanisms generating observed impact (Levitt
and List 2007).1
Second, although self-help groups have proliferated in India (and around the
world) evidence of their impact is limited compared to more traditional CDD programs. Ours is
one of the first assessments of self-help groups’ capacity to improve the quality of local public
1
Recent lab-in-the-field experiments conducted in parallel with RCTs include evaluations of post-conflict
reconstruction efforts (Fearon, Humphreys, and Weinstein 2009) and of community-based monitoring for education
(Barr, et al. 2012).
5. 4
goods. Our results suggest that SHGs can improve public service provision by creating an
institutional basis for collective action emanating from the mutual trust generated within the
framework of the rotating credit and savings association and other group activities. In sum, the
quality of the interactions created by self-help group may be more important than the quantity of
social interactions in reducing collective action costs. These findings suggest that self-help
groups may be a more effective way of bolstering cooperation within marginalized communities
than traditional CDD programs.
Community Organizations and Rural Development
Collective action has a major effect on the quality of public goods. Poor communities,
however, face higher coordination costs due to factors such as: illiteracy (Narayan et al. 2000);
limited access to information (Jones and Woolcock 2007); patron-client networks (Shami 2012);
geographic isolation (Upton 2008); ethnic diversity (Miguel and Gugerty 2005); restricted asset
ownership (Adhikari and Lovett 2006); vulnerability to shocks (Adger and Neil 2003); limited
mobility (Gugerty and Kremer 2008); and an overall sense of “exclusion” (Warren, Thompson,
and Saegert 2005), to name a few. High coordination costs and limited political agency diminish
the weight of the poor in the design and implementation of public policy. Occasionally,
marginalized groups such as smallholders, pastoralists, and women, have effectively used
collective action to strengthen property rights (Baland and Platteau 2003; von Braun and
Meinzen-Dick 2009), increase bargaining power in labor markets (Bardhan 2005), improve
access to financial markets (Karlan 2007), and improve common pool resource management
(Ostrom 1990; Ahn and Ostrom 2008). Still, poverty is almost everywhere characterized by
under-provided public goods and badly functioning public services.
6. 5
Community-Driven Development
CDD initiatives have become an important strategy to improve service delivery by
allowing communities to control resources directly, and by requiring community participation in
decision-making in order to put those resources to use. Communities typically receive external
funds to build public goods and infrastructure, but participate in the design and monitoring of
those goods. Reflecting a broader movement toward greater decentralization of service delivery
and participation by the poor, the funding of CDD programs by international donors has
expanded considerably; the World Bank alone has spent US$50 billion on CDD initiatives over
the past decade. (Mansuri and Rao 2013).
The impact of CDD initiatives is mixed. Bjorkman and Svensson (2009) and Duflo,
Dupas, and Kremer (2014) find that CDD programs increased participation in primary healthcare
in Uganda and primary schooling in Kenya, respectively. A study of community-based education
monitoring systems in Uganda finds evidence of beneficial effects to primary school
performance (Barr et al. 2012). An evaluation of a community-based post-conflict reconstruction
program in post-civil war Liberia shows that participating communities display more cooperative
features than non-participant communities (Fearon, Humphreys, and Weinstein 2009). And
evaluations of donor-funded CDD programs in the Philippines and Zambia find moderate,
positive effects on measures of community “togetherness” (Chase and Sherburne‐Benz 2001;
Labonne and Chase 2011)
By contrast, Olken (2010) reports limited effects of community monitoring on corruption
in road-building projects in Indonesia. More importantly, an examination of World Bank-
sponsored CDD programs suggests that the impact on social capital tends to be weak or short-
lived (Wong 2012). In post-conflict Sierra Leone, Casey, Glennerster, and Miguel (2012) find no
7. 6
difference between treatment and controls when looking at political processes, fundraising for
local public goods provision, or female empowerment. Similarly, Humphreys, Sanchez de la
Sierra, and van der Windt (2012) find no impact on social capital from a CDD program in
eastern Congo. In Afghanistan, a CDD program increased participation in local political
decision-making, but showed no significant impact on measures of trust (Beath, Christia, and
Enikolopov 2013). Finally, Avdeenko and Gilligan (2014) find no effects on the social networks
or pro-social behavior of a community benefiting from a CDD implemented in Sudan.
The Self-Help Group Movement
A typical CDD program usually requires beneficiaries to establish a committee, council,
or other organization to manage project implementation. Somewhat differently conceived is the
“self-help” group (SHG), one of a class of membership-based organizations whose members
provide each other with mutual support while attempting to achieve collective objectives through
community action. Self-help groups typically combine elements of classic rotating credit and
savings associations with various other group-related activities. Financial intermediation,
however, is generally seen more as an entry point to other community goals, rather than as the
primary objective. As with CDDs, the expectation is that, in time, these actions will develop an
institutional platform for improved coordination among participants, in particular, to address
deficiencies in public services over which local governments have jurisdiction.
Self-help groups can be distinguished from the more common CDD in three ways. First,
CDD initiatives are typically oriented around an intended set of public goods and services, while
self-help groups are established principally to build social cohesion among members without
reference to any “promised” public good (Chen, et al. 2007), Second, whereas CDD programs
8. 7
deliver public goods hoping that improvements to local institutions will follow, self-help groups
aim for the reverse: to enable group members to provide each other with mutual support with the
expectation that public goods will improve in quality over time. Finally, while the modalities of
implementation may differ, CDD resources are generally funded through foreign aid flows,
possibly suggesting to CDD participants that they face an unusual, possibly one-time,
opportunity. Self-help groups, on the other hand, are typically grassroots efforts to organize the
poor to deal with a country’s perpetually underperforming public goods delivery mechanisms.
The self-help group (SHG) movement has proliferated in India (Krishna 2007; Chen, et
al. 2007). SHGs have formed the cornerstones of development strategies of both central and state
governments at least since the 1990s (Reddy and Manak 2005; Basu 2006; Chakrabarti and Ravi
2011).2
Meanwhile, India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission envisions mobilizing all rural,
poor households into SHGs and similar groups in several of the poorer Indian states—
approximately 150 million citizens (Planning Commission 2011).
A typical Indian SHG consists of 10-20 members, usually women. The focus on women
is critical to the SHG movement. Women generally have lower incomes, fewer assets, and
greater vulnerabilities when contrasted with men (King and Mason 2001). Weak relative
bargaining strength can restrict women’s control over household decisions, particularly over
decisions involving children (Rosenzweig and Schultz 1982; Browning and Chiappori 1998).
Consequently, anti-poverty programs targeted to women are more likely to prevent the
2
In 1992 the central government adopted the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana (SGSY) to organize families
below the poverty line into SHGs and provide them with training, capacity building and income generating assets
through a mix of bank credit and government subsidies. At the same time the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the
National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD) also piloted the SHG-Bank Linkage Program
which granted SHGs with seed money to form “credit management groups” and to open savings accounts with rural
banks (NABARD 2013).
9. 8
transmission of poverty across generational lines than those whose main beneficiaries are men.
Finally, there is also evidence that women are lower-risk borrowers, and more responsive to the
threat of social sanctions that form the basis of group lending schemes (Armendáriz and
Morduch 2005). Consequently, more than 80 percent of all Indian SHGs are women-only
(NABARD 2013).
SHGs traditionally promote savings, link members to rural-credit institutions, and
manage local childcare services, extra-curricular programs for school children, and job-training
centers. They may also contract externally with non-state providers of healthcare and agricultural
extension services. Traditionally, members, in addition to participating in savings schemes,
receive some combination of job-skills training, agricultural support, and credit through linkages
to rural banks.
The effective functioning of these group-based, rotating credit and saving schemes
requires that members continue to contribute regularly and refrain from over-borrowing. SHGs
are not usually established for the explicit purpose of addressing problems of water scarcity or
other local public goods—although, as in the case we investigate, SHGs may be used as a
mechanism to train members in certain aspects of public goods provision, maintenance, and
monitoring. Direct effects of SHGs on improving public goods are possible. But it is far more
likely that SHGs exert an indirect influence on public goods quality through the capacity of
members to coordinate. First, it is reasonable to expect that experiences learned within the SHG
framework would be useful in reducing coordination costs more generally. Collective action is
more likely to emerge when individuals face low costs of information, opportunities to
coordinate their actions and engage in repeated interaction, and the ability to reward contributors
and punish free-riders—all of which are potentially facilitated by SHGs. Second, in time, the
10. 9
presence of SHGs is expected to foster norms of mutual trust, increase group bargaining power
with respect to service provision, and develop an institutional platform to address local issues of
importance to members (including public service provision).
SHG Benefits: Preliminary Evidence
Several studies have focused on SHGs in Andhra Pradesh, which accounts for 40 percent
of all SHGs in India (Galab and Rao 2003). Evaluations of the Velugu program—which included
SHG-bank linkages, the provision of community investment funds, and the training of SHGs to
address social problems such as child labor, gender and caste inequalities—found that the
program increased incomes, reduced poverty, and improved women’s participation in household
decisions and civic engagement (Aiyar, Narayan, and Raju 2007). Deininger and Liu (2009a)
find that 2.5 years extra exposure to the program resulted in higher consumption, nutrition levels,
and asset accumulation for poor participants. Effects were confined to program participants, and
no spillover effects into the wider communities were identified.
There is also some evidence suggesting that SHGs can build trust and social capital,
mobilize women politically, and improve public service provision to a greater extent than CDD
efforts. Sinha (2006) finds that SHG membership increases the likelihood that a woman will run
for local political office. Deininger and Liu (2009a) also find that the program increased trust in
other villagers, elected representatives and government representatives. They also find an
increase in women’s attendance in village meetings. Interestingly, these effects (contrary to the
economic effects evaluated in Deininger and Liu (2009b) were not limited to group members,
indicating spillover effects to other members of communities in which SHGs were formed.
11. 10
Finally, Casini and Vandewalle (2012) find that women in these groups are more likely to take
group action to rectify public goods deficiencies.
The limited evidence of the impact of SHGs, while more favorable than that for
traditional CDD programs, is typically constrained by the non-random placement of programs,
the non-random assignment of individuals to groups, and wide variations in the methods
employed by these organizations. To our knowledge ours is the first exploration that combines
the use of a randomized-controlled trial with lab-in-the-field techniques to explore the impact of
SHGs on intra-group coordination.
Village Groups and Water Quality
Research was conducted in Dungarpur district, a rural district of 1.1 million people
located in the “tribal belt” in southern Rajasthan, and one of the poorest districts in the country.
In 2005 the per capita income of Dungarpur stood at Rs. 12,474 (approximately $312) compared
to the state average of Rs. 16,800 (approximately $420). Twenty-one percent of the population
lives below the rural poverty line. Literacy levels are only 66 percent among men and 31 percent
among women, and 76 percent of the population is engaged in agriculture (Government of
Rajasthan 2009). In 2004, the Indian Planning Commission included Dungarpur in its Backward
Districts Initiative, which aimed to address the problems of low agricultural productivity and
rural unemployment, and to fill critical gaps in physical and social infrastructure through both
central and state-level government interventions in the 100 least-developed districts.
In 2007, Rajasthan state authorities invited the Self-Employed Women’s Association
(SEWA), a grassroots organization with a long history of working with informal-sector women
in neighboring Gujarat, to establish SHGs in Dungarpur. SEWA’s mission is to organize women
12. 11
to help them achieve “economic independence through self-reliance,” and now claims a
membership of almost two million women in twelve Indian states along with the Delhi
municipality (SEWA 2014; Datta 2000; Bhatt 2006).
The Integrated Rural Livelihoods Program
SEWA rolled out a rural SHG development pilot as a randomized-controlled trial in
Dungarpur district in 2007-2008. Villages were assigned as control or treatment villages as
follows: all villages on the census listing for Dungarpur (from 2001) were stratified according to
female literacy rate, total village population, and average household size. From these strata, 32
villages were randomly selected for the SEWA program and 48 villages were selected as control
villages (80 villages in total). All adult women in a SEWA village were invited to become
SEWA members. Members, upon paying nominal dues, would then be eligible to join SHGs and
participate in basic training programs meant to create solidarity and a common understanding of
SEWA’s objectives. Next, members were organized into SHGs, each with approximately 20
members, and each with their own (group-elected) leader (agewan). SHG leaders were given
initial training by SEWA facilitators over several weeks. Once set up, SHGs met once a month
and set savings targets of Rs. 25-100 per member to be deposited into a group savings account at
an SHG-linked bank.
The core function of the SHG is to establish and manage the group savings and credit
scheme. As we have indicated, however, SHGs also provide a forum in which local issues of
importance to women are discussed, and act as a vehicle for a diverse range of livelihood and
financial-support programs organized by the SHGs that are open to all female village residents.
In Dungarpur, SEWA’s SHGs serve as a focal point for training and education on water
13. 12
management, in particular, with respect to: (i) technology choices, locations, and cost-sharing for
maintenance of water sources; (ii) village-wide needs for hand-pump repair as well as
construction of community and private-roof rainwater harvesting tanks; and (iii) advocacy in
demanding a more reliable water supply.
Two aspects of this intervention potentially enhance the generalizability of our findings.
First, we focus on a group for whom collective action constraints are likely to be particularly
binding: rural, tribal Indian women, who face some of the lowest levels of literacy, labor-force
participation, and autonomy in the world (King and Mason 2001). More importantly, tribal
communities are among the politically weakest groups in India, and in contrast to low-caste
groups, have been slow to organize politically (Chandra 2005). In general, divisions along the
lines of religion, class, caste, ethnicity, and tribe have hindered the formation of a unified
women’s movement (Agnihotri and Mazumdar 1995). Overall participation by women in civil
society organizations also remains low (Chhibber 2001). Second, the intervention was
implemented in Rajasthan where annual mean rainfall is the lowest of any Indian state—ranging
between 20 and 45 percent of the national average. As in much of India, rainfall is concentrated
in the 3-4 months of the monsoon. The critical link between water and gender has been well-
documented: women are principally responsible for obtaining water in rural India and
consistently weight drinking water higher than other types of public services such as roads which
are primarily used by men (Chen 1991; Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004; Joshi 2011).
Results
Baseline and follow up surveys of the study area were conducted in late 2007 and in late
2009, respectively. These survey data form a pooled cross-section with treatment and control
14. 13
samples. The sample of treated women includes a total of 1,410 women who resided in the
villages where SEWA programs were implemented. Of these, 748 women were interviewed in
the 2007 baseline and 662 interviewed in the 2009 follow up surveys. The sample of control
women includes 1,795 women who did not reside in SEWA villages over the two-year period,
with 855 interviewed in 2007 and 940 in 2009.3
We examine several outcomes of interest including the diffusion of accurate information
on how to address grievances with respect to water supply problems, as well as effort undertaken
to address such grievances with the relevant authority. Water management in Indian states varies
widely by district, with village councils (panchayats), sub-district offices, and state authorities all
potentially involved in the provision and maintenance of water sources. In Rajasthan, as in some
other states, the sub-district block (tehsil) office exercises certain fiscal and administrative
powers over the villages and municipalities within its jurisdiction. In Dungarpur, within each
tehsil, rural water supply is under the authority of a Public Health and Engineering Department
(PHED). We test the hypothesis that participation in SHGs expands women’s knowledge of
authority structures in the community, and motivates them to redress grievances about public
issues. We measure learning by examining respondents’ knowledge of the PHED as the place for
reporting problems with water supplies, and we measure collective action by examining the
extent to which respondents actually contact the PHED.
3
These villages may have other SHGs operating besides SEWA’s, but none received SEWA’s Integrated Rural
Livelihoods intervention. Five villages that were originally designated as treatment villages were reclassified as
control villages because SEWA programs were not implemented until after the completion of the follow up survey
in December 2009. The delay in establishing programs in these villages is attributed to the presence of another NGO
that was operating in these villages. All results in this paper are robust to the exclusion of these villages from the
sample.
15. 14
We also examine four measures of water quality. First, we asked women to assess their
overall (household) water quality on a 4-point Likert scale (“very good,” “somewhat good,”
“somewhat bad,” or “very bad”).4
We rescale this as a binary variable by coding “very” and
“somewhat” good as 1, 0 otherwise. Second, we asked women whether they had direct access to
piped water, either through tapped water directly into their house or their land plot, or that of a
neighbor’s to which they had use. Answers are coded 1 for affirmative responses, 0 otherwise.
Third we coded responses of women who claim they had only unprotected, undeveloped sources
of water such as rivers, lakes, ponds (“no safe source”) as 1, 0 otherwise. Finally, we ask whether
women have access to irrigated water for farming, again coding affirmative responses as 1, 0
otherwise.
Differences between pre- and post-treatment means for control and treatment villages are
in Table 1. Across both types of villages, improvements in water provision can be seen over the
period of the two-year intervention. However, with the exception of reliance on unsafe water
sources, the null-hypothesis of equal means cannot be rejected pre-intervention. Post-
intervention means show significant improvements in treatment villages over control villages in
terms of: knowledge of the PHED, interaction with the PHED office, overall water quality,
household access to piped water, and access to irrigation for farming. With respect to safety of
water sources, prior to the intervention residents in treatment villages were more reliant on
unsafe and surface water. Two years later, there is no significant difference between residents in
control and treatment villages, suggesting some catch-up by treatment villages.
4
We use a 4-point scale without the neutral mid-point of the 5-point scale to force choice. Use of the 4-point can
yield greater inter-respondent reliability under conditions where respondents are well-acquainted with the issue
being rated (Chang 1994; Cummins and Gullone 2000).
16. 15
We explore these effects in the framework of a more completely specified regression
model. As individual SEWA membership is potentially endogenous to our outcome variables,
and since we are primarily interested in the effect of the opportunity of the intervention on
women in targeted villages, we use residence in SEWA village as our treatment variable and
estimate intent-to-treat (ITT) effects with the following linear probability model:
, , , SEWA Post-intervention SEWA Post-intervention
X , , , , , ,
where Yi,v,b,t is the outcome of interest for individual i in village v in block (sub-district) b during
survey year t. SEWA takes value 1 if the respondent resided in a village selected for SEWA’s
program, Post-intervention is a dummy variable that takes value 1 if the household was
interviewed after the treatment program, X is a vector of household-control variables, μ is a block
fixed-effect, and εi,v,b,t is a standard disturbance. β1 is the pre-program difference between control
and treatment villages, β2 is the trend, i.e., the changes in the outcome in the absence of the
treatment, and β3 is the ITT effect. All standard errors are clustered at the village-level.
Control variables include the respondent’s age, literacy, and marital status, and number of
children below the age of 15. In addition, we include dummies coded 1 if the respondent: is a
member of a Scheduled Tribe; a member of a Scheduled Caste; is head of household; is part of a
household that owns its own land; lives in a non-permanent (kutcha) dwelling (considered a
proxy for income and assets that is likely to be unaffected by a two-year intervention); and zero
otherwise.
Conditional results are shown in Table 2, and confirm findings in Table 1. Following the
intervention, residence in a SEWA village following the intervention increases the likelihood
that women will know where to report grievances regarding water, and that they will actually
17. 16
field such grievances. Compared to control group means, results suggest an increase in
knowledge of and action regarding local water supply by some fifty percent. Results also suggest
a relative improvement in SEWA village women’s water quality and safety, and access to
irrigation for agriculture post intervention (the result is marginally insignificant for access to
piped water).
As a test of robustness, we examine whether these ITT effects are present at the village
level. For our key dependent and independent variables we aggregate household (female)
responses in order to derive village-level percentages. These data form a panel of village-year
observations comprised of each village before and after SEWA’s rural livelihoods program. All
village-year estimations use OLS with error correction for contemporaneous correlation across
villages (“panel-correct” standard errors). Our results are reported in Table 3. Columns (1) – (3)
confirm the effects of SEWA’s intervention on improvements in the percentage of households
with access to piped water, and concomitant reductions in those who have access to “very bad”
water, as well as those who rely on unsafe water sources at the village level.
All dependent variables, thus far, have been survey based—either individual responses to
questions regarding water supply, or aggregated responses by village. We examine whether the
intervention, therefore, has yielded improvements in village water infrastructure. Village-wise
data on water supply that are coterminous with the SEWA intervention are not available.
However the 2011 Census of India includes a “Houselisting and Housing” module that records
household access to drinking water, among other amenities. We take the percentage of
households, by village, whose main source of drinking water is tap water from a treated source.
The previous census (2001), unfortunately, does not report village-wise access to drinking water,
and thus we have no baseline. On the assumption that control and treatment villages resembled
18. 17
each other at the start of the intervention, however, we can use differences between control and
treatment villages in 2011 to validate SEWA village effects described above.
Column (4) in Table 3, therefore, is a cross section of villages in 2011. Despite these
reduced degrees of freedom, we see that SEWA villages were five times more likely to have
access to piped water (note that a comparison of the sample means at the bottom of the Table
shows that, in both cases, the fractions of household with access were relatively small). In sum
there is evidence that SHG villages saw improved water provision along multiple dimensions
during the course of the intervention compared with control villages.
Fostering Cooperation: Evidence from a Public Goods Game
We have seen that the organization of marginalized women into village-based groups
facilitated tangible improvements in a critical local public good, namely, water. However, we do
not know precisely why collective action increased among these group members. Understanding
the channels by which coordination is facilitated is important for thinking about the long-term
consequences of the intervention. One such channel is that SHG participation fosters norms of
cooperation and collective action.
Within SHGs, cooperation can emerge as a preferred strategy where one believes that
other group members will similarly cooperate. This type of strategy selection mechanism has
been examined in the context of reciprocity within ethnic communities (Habyarimana, et al.
2007), as well as infinitely repeated transactions (Camera and Casari 2009). The basic theoretical
result is that cooperation is an equilibrium when agents are involved in long-term interactions,
are sufficiently patient, and have information on the actions of others. To the extent that SHGs
provide a stable environment for members, facilitate intra-group communication, and enable
19. 18
members to commit to and enforce mutual cooperation, one would expect that an efficient
outcome would be achieved due to a combination of positive and negative inducements. On the
one hand, SHG membership along with the repeated interactions occurring in the group context
can decrease the variance in strategy selection by members—that is, create expectations that
cooperation will be reciprocated—and thereby reduce risks in contributing effort. Additionally,
exclusion from group membership can serve as punishments for non-cooperative behavior.
Habyarimana, et al. (2007) find that “social sanctioning” is a major contributor to greater
cooperation among co-ethnics.
To assess the mechanisms that lead to cooperation among members of SHGs, we played
a variant of a repeated provision-point public goods game (Davis and Holt 1993; Ledyard 1995;
Eckel and Grossman 2008). The game was implemented in each of seven treatment and control
villages in 2011. Female participants were randomly selected in each village. Group sizes ranged
from nine to 14 women, but were made comparable across treatment and control villages as
much as possible.5
In our setup, each subject was assigned a number, to ensure anonymity in the distribution
of payouts. At the beginning of each round of the game, subjects were given coupons worth Rs.
20 and were told that these would be redeemable for cash at the end of the game. The players
were then asked to contribute privately any portion of the Rs. 20 into an envelope on which their
identifying number was written, which they would then place into a box. If the total amount
contributed by all players exceeded a certain provision point, initially set at N × 10 where N is
the number of players, that amount would be doubled and distributed back to the participants in
5
Variants of this game have been widely played in both classrooms and field settings (see, e.g., Abbink, Sadrieh,
and Zamir 2002; Semmann, Krambeck, and Milinski 2003).
20. 19
equal amounts.6
If the provision point was achieved in the current round, it would be raised by
20 percent in the subsequent round, and increased steadily to a maximum of (N – 1) × 20. The
game ends when this maximum provision point is reached, or after 10 rounds, whichever comes
first. If the combined contributions did not exceed the provision point, all contributions were lost
for that round. Contributory decisions were anonymous and players were instructed not to
discuss their actions with others, minimizing the risks that outside pressure or expectations
should influence the outcomes.7
Players were not told when the game would end. Each game was
played without revealing the number of rounds until the end of the game.
The literature suggests that contributions to the public good are higher in the presence of
thresholds or provision points (Marwell and Ames 1980; Isaac, Schmidtz, and Walker 1989;
Cadsby and Maynes 1998), and that these games are more efficient at soliciting the true
valuation of public goods (Rondeau, Poe, and Schulze 2005). In our setting, the provision points
give us an opportunity to study whether women from treated villages are more likely to converge
towards the cooperative outcome when a cooperative focal point is provided in the game
structure.
6
In threshold games, any contributions above the threshold are wasted, while in provision-point games, any
contributions above the threshold also contribute to total repayment. Formally we can write the payoff of a
representative player in the stage game as
20 2
∑
,
where
1
0
.
The parameter ci is the individual specific contribution, N is group size, θ is the provision point, and I is an indicator
function taking on the value of 1 if total contributions exceed the provision point and 0 otherwise
7
We are cognizant that measuring and scrutiny can exaggerate pro-social behavior (Levitt and List 2007), and
therefore played all rounds and all games without any counting of individual balances until the game concluded.
21. 20
Game Results
Games were played in 14 villages (7 treatment, 7 control) beginning one year subsequent
to the follow-up survey in two batches (8 games played in winter, 6 games played in the
following summer). We distinguish between three types of players; SHG members in treatment
villages, non-members in treatment village, and women in control villages. We hypothesize that
SHG members and non-members will behave differently in these group games. First,
membership itself can create group identity, as detected in experimental studies using highly
artificial means to divide players into groups (e.g. Chen and Li 2009). Second, SHG members
have been told the benefits of collective action and are accustomed to making decisions in
groups. Most of them are also part of rotating credit and savings scheme, implying repeated
interaction that requires a certain amount of trust and cooperation to operate properly. Third, to
the extent that SHG membership is highly valued, the potential threat to be excluded from the
group also creates an additional sanctioning tool for non-cooperative behavior. We therefore
expect SHG members to display higher levels of trust and contribute greater amounts to the
public goods than their non-member village counterparts, something that should be measurable
in the first round of play. Given our survey evidence on the externalities of SEWA programs,
however, we also do expect that non-members in treatment villages will feature more
cooperative behavior than women in control villages.
Game players were briefly surveyed in order to obtain basic information regarding their
age, socio-economic status, education and occupation. Differences between the characteristics of
treatment and control populations are presented in Table 5, showing no significant difference
between the two. Summary statistics for differences in some key game characteristics in control
and treatment villages are listed in Table 6. We also differentiate between the first round and the
22. 21
subsequent rounds, as the first round picks up norms of cooperation and trust most cleanly (Berg,
Dickhaut, and McCabe 1995). Subsequent rounds, additionally, can show any learning that takes
place under conditions of repeated interactions.
Figure 1 indicates that average contributions in the first round are the highest for SHG
members in treatment villages, and the differences compared to the other groups are statistically
significant. Women in treatment villages contributed, on average, Rs. 12.5 compared to women
in control villages who gave Rs. 8.6 in the first round—a difference of over 45 percent
representing almost one-fifth of the initial endowment.8
There are also differences between SEWA members and non-members within treatment
villages. Recall that we played “mixed group games”, that is, with groups containing both
members and non-members, in two treated villages. In the first village, the group was evenly
split between members and non-members. In the second group, 4 out of the 14 players were non-
members. First-round average contributions were Rs. 4 lower in the first village (with an even
split) than the second village (with a 70-30 split) and the difference is statistically significant at
the 1% level. Small sample size renders these results far from conclusive, but they point in the
same direction as other results.
The difference persists over subsequent rounds of the game. Comparing average
contributions over the whole game is complicated by the fact that game length varied, and
control villages tended to play more rounds, as they were slower to converge towards
8
Reviews of public-goods games in other settings find wide variations in cooperativeness, but players typically
contribute 40 – 60 percent of the initial endowment, even as theory predicts zero contributions (Heinrich, et al.
2001; Davis and Holt 1993; Janssen and Ahn 2003). Contributions tend to be lower if initial endowments are more
unequal or if groups are more heterogeneous (Cadsby and Maynes 1998).
23. 22
cooperation.9
All villages played least three rounds; for these three rounds women in treatment
villages contributed an average of Rs. 11.7 while their counterparts in control villages
contributed an average of Rs. 9.4.
SHG members contributed more than non-members in the first round, but, as shown in
Figure 2, non-members in treatment villages then increased their contributions to match that of
SHG members. In the end average contributions across all rounds were almost identical, and the
difference between members and non-members is statistically insignificant, suggesting that non-
members may initially be uncertain of the extent to which members have internalized
cooperative norms, but after learning act as conditional cooperators. The main divide in
subsequent rounds is between residents of treatment and control villages, rather than between
members and non-members.
Since the games varied in the number of players and rounds, and the provision points
could vary across villages in the same round of play, a more robust comparison requires
controlling for these differences. Regressions take the following form:
, , SEWA Member EWA Non‐member , ,
where Zi,r,v is the outcome of interest indexed by individual i in round r of the game in village v.
SEWA Member takes value 1 if an individual was a member of an SHG in a treatment village,
SEWA Non-member takes value 1 if an the individual resides in a treatment village but was not a
member of an SHG, X is a vector of individual control variables, R is a vector of round-specific
variables, and νi,r,v is a random disturbance. Of the parameters to be estimated, γ1 is the direct
treatment effect (SHG membership), γ2 is the indirect treatment effect (within-village spillover).
9
Players did not know whether another round would be conducted. We announced each round as a “surprise”.
24. 23
Additional individual control variables include age and literacy (measured on the basis of
whether game players could sign their name). We also include round-specific controls, including
round dummies and provision point. Finally, we include dummies for the days of the week, and
the particular season in which the games were played. All errors are clustered by village.
Table 6 presents results from the first round. We look at four outcomes: (1) individual
contributions; (2) gross payouts (total earnings from the common fund distributed equally); (3)
the difference between a woman’s payout and the amount she would have earned from playing
the Nash strategy of contributing nothing (“gap”); and (4) net earnings (gross payout less the
contributed amount).
Contributions, which most directly reflect norms of trust and cooperation, are
significantly higher for SHG members who contribute some 15% (Rs. 3) more than non-
members in both treatment and control villages. That cooperation also benefits SHG members,
who receive larger payouts than they would have from defecting. Note that the “SEWA village,
non-member” dummy is insignificant, indicating that the main differences in first-round strategy
selection fall between SHG members and all non-members.
In Table 7 we present regressions including data from all rounds. Estimates in Table 7
suggest that on average all women in treatment villages—both SEWA members and
nonmembers—contribute Rs. 4 (20 percent of their per-round endowment) more than women in
control villages. As in the first round, higher contributions are also associated with higher
benefits: treatment village residents receive on average an extra Rs. 19.5 in gross payouts, and an
extra Rs. 16 in net earnings, compared to their counterparts in control villages.
Overall, the results suggest that once learning becomes a factor in subsequent rounds,
differences in strategy selection between treatment and control villages are greater than those
25. 24
between members and non-members. Returns to cooperative behavior become stronger in
subsequent rounds as non-members raise contributions, and as all women from treatment villages
receive higher payouts and achieve greater earnings from game play than women in control
villages.
These data can also be used to examine differences in strategies for women as a function
of their own gains/losses throughout the game. We include lagged net earnings (payout less
contributions) to determine whether the propensity to contribute is affected by previous round
net gain/loss. In column (2), the coefficient for lagged net earnings is negative in the case of
contributions, suggesting that women in control villages who received higher payouts in the
previous round by contributing less lowered their contributions in the following round. However,
the positive, significant coefficient for lagged earnings indicates that women in treatment
villages behaved in the opposite way: a woman who profited in the previous round from
contributing less increased her contributions in the current round. Synchronization of strategies
ensured that these women collectively achieved higher payouts than the zero-contribution
strategy. This may be the strongest piece of evidence in support of the hypothesis that SHGs
foster norms of cooperation. Note that lagged earnings and their interaction with the treatment
indicator only affect current-round contributions and the difference between actual payout and
the case where players simply kept the Rs. 20; neither variable affects gross or net payouts.
Testing an Alternate Channel: Preferences
An alternative, potential channel by which cooperation may be achieved is through the
convergence of preferences for public goods. The management of disagreements over which
public goods to prioritize plays a crucial role in facilitating (or obstructing) cooperation. A well-
26. 25
known problem in multi-ethnic societies, for example, is that group identity is associated with
public goods preferences. Thus Rabushka and Shepsle (1972) argue that democracy is infeasible
in ethnically divided societies because polarized preferences will prevent effective power
sharing. Alesina, Baqir and Easterly (1999) argue that ethnic diversity, along with resulting
divergent preferences over types of public goods, leads to lower aggregate provision. This
central idea—that divergent preferences undermine cooperation—transfers to the problem of
cooperation among the rural poor. In our empirical setting, it is possible that group interaction
within the framework of the SHG caused preferences among women regarding public goods to
converge through indoctrination by SEWA, through shared information, or through group
pressure.
Converging preferences, if observed in SHG villages, can also suggest elite capture: that
group activities are appropriated by local elites. If village elites have pressured, cajoled, or
otherwise influenced SHG members to select a specific public good, then endemic inequities of
class or caste may increase in response to the presence of organizations like SHGs (Platteau and
Gaspart 2003). Moreover, group members may internalize elite preferences over time.
Concordance Estimates
To test whether preferences for public goods are converging we estimate an inter-rater
reliability coefficient that quantifies the extent of agreement across subjects on the rating or
ranking of a set number of variables. We provide concordance coefficients pre- and post-
intervention, for control as well as SEWA villages, and for the latter, for both SEWA members
and non-members post-intervention. We use Krippendorff’s alpha (α) coefficient, a measure
widely used to assess the reliability of subjectively-coded response data by multiple coders, 0 ≤ α
27. 26
≤ 1, with α = 1 being perfect agreement, α = 0 perfect disagreement. Comparisons of various
measures of inter-coder reliability have shown that Krippendorff’s α carries lower annotator bias
and bias due to “category prevalence,” i.e., where a disproportionate amount of annotated data
falls into a particular coding category (Antoine, Villaneau, and Lefeuvre 2014; Arstein and
Poesio 2008).10
Treating all residents within a particular group as “raters” we estimate alpha coefficients
for the group based on how individual respondents rank public goods priorities, as well as how
they rate the quality of individual public goods. If the SHG intervention has caused convergence
of preferences we expect to see a difference-in-difference effect, that is, an increase in
concordance among women in SEWA villages post-intervention in excess of that observed
among women in control villages. Women were asked rank the top three village-level priorities
among water, sanitation, health, electricity, education, work/employment, and roads. They were
then asked to rate each of these services with respect to their quality and availability on a
standard (5-point) Likert scale. The upper panel of Table 4 shows alpha coefficients for rankings
of public goods priorities; the lower panel shows coefficients for ratings of public good quality.
All alpha coefficients are increasing over time, suggesting some convergence. This
increase, however, is larger in the control than in treatment villages, suggesting that the temporal
increase has little to do with the intervention. Alpha coefficients for quality ratings, similarly,
show weaker convergence in villages where SEWA was present compared to those where
10
The basic form for Krippendorff’s α coefficient is α = 1 – (Do/De) where Do is the observed disagreement and De
is the disagreement one would expect when the coding of units is attributable to chance rather than to the properties
of these units themselves. Where Do = 0 and α = 1, there is perfect reliability. When observers agree as if chance
had produced the results, Do = De and α = 0, which indicates the absence of reliability. For details on the calculation
of Krippendorff’s α see, e.g., Krippendorff (2011), and Hayes and Krippendorff (2007).
28. 27
SEWA was absent. Overall we find little evidence of the SHG intervention causing preferences
for public goods to converge.
Conclusion
Two decades of research indicates that public goods provision is impeded by the inability
of individuals to coordinate for a common purpose, and that in this regard, the poor face steep
coordination constraints. The resulting, weaker relative bargaining strength of low-income
groups has been shown to decrease investments in, and raise the cost of access to, public goods
and services available to poor communities.
In this paper we have sought to examine whether a marginalized group of women lacking
any history of mobilization, and suffering from costly deficiencies in a particular public good,
can organize itself to improve local public goods provision. Finding that it can, we then seek to
determine why. Our investigation consists of two parts; an evaluation of the effects of self-help
groups on local public goods relying on a randomized controlled trial, and a lab-in-the-field
experiment to better understand intra-group cooperative strategies.
We focus principally on the extent to which the intervention positively affected water
delivery and quality, and find three principal effects. First, female residents of villages where
self-help groups were started possess greater knowledge of how to address problems of water
supply and water deficiency. Second, women in self-help group villages are more likely to
contact local authorities regarding their grievances with respect to water service. Third, women
in self-help group villages report greater improvements in water access and infrastructure
compared to their counterparts in control villages. Indicators of the quality of water, access to
piped water, and reliance on unsafe surface/rainwater are confirmed by data from the 2011
29. 28
census on village-level water infrastructure. Results suggest strong spillovers from members to
non-members in villages where self-help groups were established.
A series of public goods games played in control and treatment villages strongly suggest
that the presence of self-help groups contributed to trust and cooperation among village women.
SHG members initially contribute more than both non-members in SEWA villages and women
in control villages. In subsequent rounds, when learning becomes a factor, non-members in
SEWA villages contribute roughly the same amount as members, and significantly more than
women in control villages. Meanwhile women initially benefitting from non-cooperation in the
previous round tend to persist with that strategy in control villages. But in treatment villages
norms of cooperation trump selfish behavior even when women benefit from free riding; we
observe that those early “winners” increase their contributions in subsequent rounds in villages
where self-help groups are present.
That the main difference lies between treatment and control villages, not between SHG
members and non-members in treatment villages, suggests that the intervention of SEWA, which
is meant to encompass all women in the village, indeed increases trust and cooperation beyond
just the group members. From a group identity perspective this means that SEWA has succeeded
in having self-help group members internalizing other-regarding preferences beyond just
membership, identifying also other women in the village as being part of the group whose
interests they share. We find no evidence that women in treatment villages—whether self-help
group members or non-members—have moved towards holding common preferences regarding
which public goods are deficient or about which public good improvements should be
prioritized.
30. 29
Although these findings may not be applicable to all cases where marginalized groups
face collective action constraints, our results—however preliminary—suggest that self-help
groups have achieved increased coordination among marginalized communities not by forcing
members to value the same things, but rather, by changing incentives members face by
minimizing individual risks of cooperation. This result stands in contrast to much evidence
concerning the lack of social capital formation in community-driven development type programs.
We argue that the specific characteristics of self-help groups programs may lie behind the
results, in particular, the repeated interactions not necessarily oriented towards the design and
implementation of specific development projects, but simply as a means of institutionalizing
effective local collective action.
31. 30
Table 1: Unconditional differences in pre- and post-treatment water access
Pre-treatment Post-treatment
Mean Difference Mean Difference
Knowledge of PHED 0.164
0.183
0.019 0.250
0.406
0.156***
Contacted PHED 0.139
0.160
0.021 0.220
0.349
0.128***
Overall water quality 0.174
0.166
-0.008 0.241
0.370
0.297***
Access to piped water 0.112
0.134
0.022 0.088
0.182
0.093***
No safe water source 0.162
0.281
0.119*** 0.069
0.052
-0.017
Access to irrigation for farming 0.011
0.007
-0.004 0.025
0.061
0.035***
Notes: Differences are generated from two-sample t-tests by control/treatment group (treatment means are
italicized). * p < 0.10; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01.
32. 31
Table 2: Water access and quality, conditional effects
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Knowledge of
PHED
Contacted
PHED
Overall water
Quality
Access to
piped water
No safe
source
Irrigation for
farming
SEWA Village 0.011
(0.021)
0.015
(0.022)
-0.032
(0.039)
-0.008
(0.042)
0.120*
(0.067)
-0.006
(0.008)
Post-Intervention 0.093***
(0.025)
0.087***
(0.023)
0.067*
(0.035)
-0.013
(0.029)
-0.091**
(0.041)
0.014
(0.011)
SEWA Village × Post-Intervention 0.122**
(0.051)
0.095*
(0.052)
0.145**
(0.062)
0.080
(0.052)
-0.141**
(0.071)
0.039**
(0.017)
Age -0.001
(0.001)
-0.001
(0.001)
0.002*
(0.001)
0.001**
(0.001)
-0.001*
(0.001)
0.000
(0.000)
Head of Household 0.010
(0.031)
0.010
(0.030)
0.021
(0.027)
0.071***
(0.026)
-0.024
(0.023)
-0.013
(0.009)
Scheduled Tribe -0.058**
(0.028)
-0.051*
(0.026)
-0.157***
(0.037)
-0.260***
(0.047)
0.040
(0.039)
0.002
(0.010)
Scheduled Caste 0.044
(0.065)
0.052
(0.063)
-0.074
(0.054)
-0.086
(0.084)
0.038
(0.043)
-0.001
(0.015)
Literate 0.168***
(0.030)
0.130***
(0.032)
0.095***
(0.027)
0.075***
(0.023)
-0.025
(0.016)
0.006
(0.009)
Married -0.058*
(0.034)
-0.044
(0.037)
-0.042
(0.043)
0.029
(0.028)
-0.067**
(0.030)
0.004
(0.014)
Children -0.001
(0.005)
-0.002
(0.005)
-0.002
(0.005)
-0.004
(0.003)
0.011**
(0.005)
0.002
(0.002)
Landowner -0.035
(0.024)
-0.026
(0.026)
0.029
(0.022)
0.013
(0.015)
0.018
(0.016)
-0.006
(0.007)
Kutcha -0.080***
(0.021)
-0.059***
(0.020)
-0.117***
(0.027)
-0.113***
(0.026)
0.018
(0.017)
-0.014
(0.009)
N 3,205 3,205 3,195 3,198 3,198 3,205
R2
0.101 0.076 0.123 0.288 0.080 0.021
Control group mean 0.208 0.181 0.209 0.100 0.114 0.134
Treatment group mean 0.291 0.251 0.265 0.157 0.171 0.178
Notes: Results are OLS with errors clustered by village. Block (tehsil) fixed effects and intercepts are estimated but not reported. * p<0.1; ** p<0.05;
*** p<0.01.
33. 32
Table 3: Water quality and access, village-level results
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Percent with
piped water
(Survey)
Percent with
poor access to
water
(Survey)
Percent with
no safe source
(Survey)
Percent with
piped water
(Census 2011)
SEWA Village 1.474**
(0.681)
-1.093
(0.812)
6.579***
(0.891)
5.417**
(2.456)
Post-Intervention 1.334*
(0.753)
-21.297***
(1.485)
-12.644***
(0.801)
SEWA Village ×
Post-Intervention
5.358***
(1.301)
-8.276***
(1.298)
-6.609***
(2.189)
Literate (%) 0.162***
(0.029)
-0.460***
(0.141)
-0.085
(0.202)
0.037
(0.101)
Married (%) -0.167
(0.249)
0.324
(0.297)
0.363
(0.228)
-0.162
(0.235)
Kutcha (%) -0.239***
(0.054)
0.019
(0.106)
-0.097
(0.080)
-0.080
(0.051)
Scheduled Tribe (%) -0.339***
(0.071)
0.198**
(0.098)
0.089
(0.149)
-0.132**
(0.058)
Scheduled Caste (%) -0.417**
(0.170)
0.021
(0.146)
-0.001
(0.104)
-0.286**
(0.127)
N 157 157 154 79
Villages 80 80 77
R2
0.506 0.383 0.132 0.356
(p > χ2
) 0.000 0.000 0.000
Control village mean 7.310 66.421 12.070 1.260
Treatment village mean 14.465 58.877 14.945 7.193
Notes: Observations are village-year (before/after) aggregated from baseline and endline surveys (columns 1 –
3) or taken from the Census of India 2011 (column 4); census figures are for a village cross-section. Survey-
based results are generated using OLS with panel-correct standard errors, corrected for contemporaneous
correlation across villages. Census-based results are OLS with robust standard errors. * p<0.1; ** p<0.05; ***
p<0.01.
34. 33
Table 4: Differences in demographic characteristics, game players
Control mean Treatment mean Difference
Age 32.950 32.604 -0.349
Education 1.440 1.416 -0.025
Literacy 0.233 0.313 0.080
* p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01.
35. 34
Table 5: Summary statistics for all rounds, treatment and control areas
Control Treatment
Non-Members
SEWA
Members only
SEWA
Members and
Non-Members
Number of rounds played 6.5 4.6 4.75
Number of players in each round 12 12 15
Fraction of rounds in which cooperation was achieved 0.51 0.59 0.62
Average of payouts per round – Payouts from Nash strategy
of contributing 0 in each round (Rs.)
6.05 31.23 25.46
36. Figure 1:
Notes: Ba
confidence
Average cont
ars are average
e intervals.
tributions by g
contributions
group
of different co
35
horts for first rround and all ssubsequent rouunds, with ±95%%
38. 37
Table 6: Regressions results for experimental games, first round
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Contribution Payout Gap Net Earnings
SEWA Member 2.926***
(0.757)
2.935
(1.951)
3.142***
(0.719)
0.009
(1.823)
Non Member,
SEWA Village
-0.317
(0.683)
-1.474
(2.753)
-0.189
(0.730)
-1.157
(3.180)
Provision Point 0.143***
(0.017)
0.304***
(0.054)
0.102***
(0.012)
0.162***
(0.043)
Age -0.007
(0.041)
0.027
(0.038)
-0.016
(0.040)
0.034
(0.048)
Literate -0.061
(0.456)
-0.317
(1.015)
-0.197
(0.473)
-0.257
(1.093)
N 186 186 186 186
R2
0.415 0.756 0.354 0.354
Notes: Village-clustered standard errors are in parentheses. Intercepts and seasonal
dummies are included but not reported. *
p < 0.10, **
p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01.
39. 38
Table 7: Regression results for experimental games, all rounds
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)
Contribution Payout Gap Net Earnings
SEWA Member 3.861***
(1.082)
4.032***
(1.022)
20.946***
(4.743)
24.371***
(5.150)
4.446***
(0.902)
4.414***
(0.698)
16.997***
(3.966)
20.178***
(4.496)
Non-Member, SEWA Village 3.254**
(1.296)
4.128***
(1.305)
19.511***
(5.984)
22.784***
(7.227)
3.925***
(1.019)
4.609***
(0.970)
16.157***
(5.232)
18.479**
(6.460)
SEWA Village × Net Earningsr-1 0.017**
(0.006)
0.012**
(0.005)
-0.113***
(0.027)
-0.134***
(0.028)
-0.033***
(0.007)
-0.037***
(0.006)
-0.131***
(0.024)
-0.147***
(0.025)
Net Earningsr-1 0.082**
(0.038)
0.058
(0.202)
0.069
(0.041)
-0.021
(0.184)
Provision Point -0.060**
(0.027)
-0.172
(0.129)
-0.075**
(0.027)
-0.117
(0.132)
R2
1,034 848 1,046 860 1,046 860 1,046 860
N 0.417 0.368 0.435 0.510 0.114 0.135 0.448 0.499
Notes: Village-clustered standard errors are in parentheses. Intercepts, coefficients for age and literacy, along with dummies for round played, day, and
season in which games were played are estimated but not reported. *
p < 0.10, **
p < 0.05, ***
p < 0.01.
40. 39
Table 8: Concordances for control and treatment groups
Pre-
intervention
Post-
intervention
Difference
Rankings
Control 0.514* 0.756*** 0.242
Treatment 0.479* 0.620*** 0.140
SEWA members 0.599*** 0.120
Non-members, SEWA villages 0.655*** 0.176
Ratings
Control 0.102 0.149 0.048
Treatment 0.113 0.156 0.042
SEWA members 0.137 0.024
Non-members, SEWA villages 0.182* 0.068
Notes: Figures are Krippendorff’s α inter-rater concordance/reliability coefficients, calculated for each cohort pre-
and post-intervention. “Raters” are individuals within each group. Control refers to all residents of non-SEWA
villages, treatment refers to both members and non-members in SEWA villages. Upper panel shows reliability
coefficients when individuals are asked to rank the top three village-level priorities: water, sanitation, health,
electricity, education, work, and roads. Lower panel shows reliability coefficients when individual are asked to
score each of these issues with respect to their quality and availability. Significance levels are generated from
bootstrapped distributions of Krippendorff's α to obtain confidence intervals. For SEWA members and non-
members in SEWA villages, differences are calculated against pre-intervention treatment means.
41. 40
References
Abbink, Klaus, Abdolkarim Sadrieh, and Shmuel Zamir, 2004. “Fairness, Public Good, and
Emotional Aspects of Punishment Behavior.” Theory and Decision 57 (1): 25-57.
Adger, W. Neil. 2003. “Social Capital, Collective Action, and Adaptation to Climate Change.”
Economic Geography 79 (4): 387-404.
Adhikari, Bhim, and Jon C. Lovett. 2006. “Institutions and Collective Action: Does
Heterogeneity Matter in Community-Based Resource Management?” Journal of
Development Studies 42 (3): 426-445.
Agnihotri, Indu, and Vina Mazumdar. 1995. “Changing Terms of Political Discourse: Women's
Movement in India, 1970s-1990s.” Economic and Political Weekly, 1869-1878.
Ahn, T.K., and Elinor Ostrom. 2008. “Social Capital and Collective Action.” In Dario
Castiglione, Jan van Deth, and Guglielmo Wolleb, eds. Handbook of Social Capital. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Aiyar, Swaminathan A., Deepa Narayan, and K Raju. 2007. “Empowerment through Self-Help
Groups.” In Deepa Narayan and Elina Glinskayam, eds. Ending Poverty in South Asia:
Ideas that Work. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Alesina, Alberto, Reza Baqir, and William Easterly. 1999. “Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions.”
Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (4): 1243-84.
Antoine, Jean-Yves, Jeanne Villaneau, and Anaïs Lefeuvre. 2014. “Weighted Krippendorff's
Alpha is a More Reliable Metrics for Multi-Coders Ordinal Annotations: Experimental
42. 41
Studies on Emotion, Opinion, and Coreference Annotation.” Proceedings of the 14th
Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Gothenburg, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Armendáriz, Beatriz, and Jonathan Morduch. 2005. The Economics of Microfinance. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Arstein, Ron, and Massimo Poesio. 2008. “Inter-Coder Agreement for Computational
Linguistics.” Computational Linguistics 34 (4): 555-596.
Avdeenko, Alexandra, and Michael J. Gilligan. 2014. “International Interventions to Build Social
Capital: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Sudan.” Policy Research Working Paper
6772, World Bank, Washington, DC.
Baland, Jean-Marie, and Jean-Philippe Platteau. 2003. “Economics of Common Property
Management Regimes.” In Karl-Göran Mäler and Jeffrey R. Vincent, ed. Handbook of
Environmental Economics. Vol. 1. North Holland: Elsevier.
Banerjee, Abhijit, Lakshmi Iyer, and Rohini Somanathan. 2007. “Public Action for Public
Goods.” In T. Paul Schulz and John Strauss, eds. Handbook of Development Economics.
Vol. 4. North Holland: Elsevier.
Banfield, Edward C. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Bardhan, Pranab K. 2005. Scarcity, Conflicts, and Cooperation: Essays in the Political and
Institutional Economics of Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
43. 42
Barr, Abigail, Frederick Mugisha,, Pieter Serneels, and Andrew Zeitlin. 2012. “Information and
Collective Action in the Community Monitoring of Schools: Field and Lab Experimental
Evidence from Uganda.” Georgetown University. Typescript.
Basu, Priya. 2006. Improving Access to Finance for India's Rural Poor. Washington, DC: World
Bank.
Beath, Andrew, Fotini Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov. 2013. “Empowering Women through
Development Aid: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan.” American
Political Science Review 107 (3): 540–57.
Berg, Joyce, John Dickhaut, and Kevin Mccabe. 1995. “Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History.”
Games and Economic Behavior 10 (1): 122-142.
Bhatt, Ela R. 2006. We Are Poor But So Many: The Story of Self-Employed Women in India.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Bjorkman, Martina, and Jakob Svensson. 2009. “Power to the People: Evidence from a
Randomized Field Experiment on Community-Based Monitoring in Uganda.” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 124 (2): 735–69.
Browning, Martin, and Pierre A. Chiappori. 1998. "Efficient Intra-Household Allocations: a
General Characterization and Empirical Tests." Econometrica, 66 (6): 1241-1278.
Cadsby, C. Bram, and Elizabeth Maynes. 1998. “Gender and Free Riding in a Threshold Public
Goods Game: Experimental Evidence.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
34 (4): 603-620.
44. 43
Casey, Katherine, Rachel Glennerster, and Edward Miguel. 2012. “Reshaping Institutions:
Evidence on Aid Impacts Using a Preanalysis Plan.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127
(4): 1755-1812.
Casini, Paolo, and Lore Vandewalle. 2012. “Public Good Provision in Indian Rural Areas: the
Returns to Collective Action by Microfinance Groups.” University of Namur and Georg-
August-Universität Gottingen. Typescript.
Camera, Gabriele, and Marco Casari. 2009. “Cooperation among Strangers under the Shadow of
the Future.” American Economic Review 99 (3): 979-1005.
Chakrabarti, Rajesh, and Shamika Ravi. 2011. “At the Crossroads: Microfinance in India.”
Money & Finance (July): 125-148.
Chandra, Kanchan. 2005. “Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability.” Perspectives on Politics 3
(2): 235-252.
Chang, Lei. 1994. “A Psychometric Evaluation of 4-Point and 6-Point Likert-Type Scales in
Relation to Reliability and Validity.” Applied Psychological Measurement 18 (3): 205-
216.
Chase, Robert S., and Lynne Sherburne-Benz. 2001. “Household Effects of African
Community Initiatives: Evaluating the Impact of the Zambia Social Fund.” World Bank
Report, Washington DC.
Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra, and Esther Duflo. 2004. “Women As Policy Makers: Evidence
from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India.” Econometrica 72 (5): 1409-1443.
45. 44
Chen, Martha. 1991. Coping With Seasonality and Drought. Sage Publications, India.
Chen, Martha, Renana Jhabvala, Ravi Kanbur, and Carol Richards. 2007. Membership Based
Organizations of the Poor. London: Routledge.
Chen, Yan, and Sherry Xin Li. 2009. “Group Identity and Social Preferences.” American
Economic Review, 99 (1): 431-57.
Chhibber, Pradeep K. 2001. Democracy Without Associations: Fransformation of the Party
System and Social Cleavages in India. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Cummins, Robert A., and Eleonora Gullone. 2000. “Why We Should Not Use 5-Point Likert
Scales: the Case for Subjective Quality of Life Measurement,” Proceedings, Second
International Conference on Quality of Life in Cities. Singapore: National University of
Singapore.
Datta, Rekha. 2000. “On Their Own: Development Strategies of the Self-Employed Women's
Association (SEWA) in India.” Development 43 (4): 51-55.
Davis, Douglas D., and Charles A. Holt. 1993. Experimental Economics. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Deininger, Klaus, and Yanyan Liu. 2009a. “Economic and Social Impacts of Self-Help Groups
in India.” Policy Research Working Paper No. 4884, World Bank, Washington, DC.
Deininger, Klaus, and Yanyan Liu. 2009b. “Determinants of Repayment Performance in Indian
Micro-Credit Groups.” Policy Research Working Paper No. 4885, World Bank,
Washington, DC.
46. 45
Devarajan, Shantayanan, and Ritva Reinikka. 2004. "Making Services Work for Poor
People." Journal of African Economies 13 (Suppl. 1): I142-I166.
DFID [Department for International Development]. 2010. The Politics of Poverty: Elites,
Citizens and States: Findings from Ten Years of DFID-Funded Research on Governance
and Fragile States 2001–2010. London: DFID.
Duflo, Esther, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer. 2014. “School Governance, Teacher
Incentives, and Pupil–Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary
Schools.” Journal of Public Economics. Forthcoming.
Durkheim, Emile. [1893] 1947. The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Eckel, C. Catherine, and Philip J. Grossman. 2008. “Differences in the Economic Decisions of
Men and Women: Experimental Evidence.” Handbook of Experimental Economics
Results. Vol. 1. North Holland: Elsevier.
Fearon, James D., Macartan Humphreys, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. 2009. “Can Development
Aid Contribute to Social Cohesion After Civil War? Evidence from a Field Experiment in
Post-Conflict Liberia.” American Economic Review 99 (2): 287-291.
Galab, S., and N. Chandrasekhara Rao. 2003. “Women's Self-Help Groups, Poverty Alleviation
and Empowerment.” Economic and Political Weekly 38 (12/13): 1274-1283.
Government of Rajasthan. 2009. Dungarpur District Human Development Report. Jaipur:
Institute for Development Studies.
47. 46
Gugerty, Mary Kay, and Michael Kremer. 2008. “Outside Funding and the Dynamics of
Participation in Community Associations.” American Journal of Political Science 52 (3):
585-602.
Habyarimana, James, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel N. Posner, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. 2007.
“Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?” American Political
Science Review, 101 (4): 709-725.
Hayes, Andrew F., and Klaus Krippendorff. 2007. “Answering the Call for a Standard Reliability
Measure for Coding Data.” Communication Methods and Measures, 1 (1): 77-89.
Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, and
Richard Mcelreath. 2001. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in
15 Small-Scale Societies.” American Economic Review 91 (2): 73-78.
Humphreys, Macartan, Raul Sanchez De La Sierra, and Peter Van Der Windt. 2012. “Social and
Economic Impacts of Tuungane: Final Report of the Effects of a Community Driven
Reconstruction Program in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.” Columbia Center
for the Study of Development Strategies.
Isaac, R. Mark, David Schmidtz, and James M. Walker. 1989. “The Assurance Problem in a
Laboratory Market.” Public Choice 62 (3), 217-236.
Janssen, Marco A., and T. K. Ahn. 2006. “Learning, Signaling, and Social Preferences in Public-
Good Games.” Ecology and Society 11 (2): 21-44.
48. 47
Jones, Veronica Nyhan, and Michael Woolcock. 2007. “Using Mixed Methods to Assess Social
Capital in Low Income Countries: A Practical Guide.” Brooks World Poverty Institute
Working Paper 1207, University of Manchester.
Joshi, Deepa. 2011. “Caste, Gender and the Rhetoric of Reform in India's Drinking Water
Sector.” Economic & Political Weekly 46 (18): 57-57.
Karlan, Dean S. 2007. “Social Connections and Group Banking.” Economic Journal 117 (517):
F52-F84.
King, Elizabeth M., and Andrew D. Mason. 2001. Engendering Development: Through Gender
Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Krippendorff, Klaus. 2011. "Agreement and Information in the Reliability of Coding."
Communication Methods and Measures 5 (2): 93-112.
Krishna, Anirudh. 2007. “How Does Social Capital Grow? A Seven-Year Study of Villages in
India.” Journal of Politics 69 (4): 941–56.
Labonne, Julien, and Robert S. Chase. 2011. “Do Community-Driven Development Projects
Enhance Social Capital? Evidence from the Philippines.” Journal of Development
Economics 96 (2): 348–58.
Ledyard, John O. 1995. “Public Goods: a Survey of Experimental Research.” In John H. Kagel
and Alvin E. Roth, eds. Handbook of Experimental Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
49. 48
Levitt, Steven D., and John A. List. 2007. “What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social
Preferences Reveal About the Real World?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21 (2):
153-174.
Mansuri, Ghazala, and Vijayendra Rao. 2013. Localizing Development: Does Participation
Work? Washington DC: World Bank.
Marwell, Gerald, and Ruth E. Ames. 1980. “Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods II:
Provision Points, Stakes, Experience, and the Free-Rider Problem.” American Journal of
Sociology 85 (4): 926-937.
Miguel, Edward, and Mary Kay Gugerty. 2005. "Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public
goods in Kenya." Journal of Public Economics 89 (11): 2325-2368.
NABARD [National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development]. 2013. Status of Micro-
Credit in India 2012-13. New Delhi: SAGE Publications
Narayan, Deepa, Raj Patel, Kai Schafft, Anne Rademacher, and Sara Koch-Schulte. 2000. Voices
of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? New York: Oxford University Press.
Olken, Benjamin A. 2010. “Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods: Evidence from a Field
Experiment in Indonesia.” American Political Science Review, 104 (2): 243-267.
Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective
Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Planning Commission, Government of India. 2011. Report of Working Group on National Rural
Livelihoods Mission (NRLM). New Delhi: Government of India.
50. 49
Platteau, Jean-Philippe, and Frédéric Gaspart. 2003. “The Risk of Resource Misappropriation in
Community-Driven Development.” World Development, 31 (10): 1687-1703.
Rabushka, Alvin and Kenneth A. Shepsle. 1972. Politics in Plural Societies. Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Reddy, C.S., and Sandeep Manak. 2005. Self-Help Groups: a Keystone of Microfinance in India-
Women Empowerment and Social Security. Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Mahila
Abhivruddhi Society.
Rondeau, Daniel, Gregory L. Poe, and William D. Schulze. 2005. “VCM Or PPM? A
Comparison of the Performance of Two Voluntary Public Goods Mechanisms.” Journal
of Public Economics 89 (8): 1581-1592.
Rosenzweig, Mark R., and T. Paul Schultz. 1982. "Child Mortality and Fertility in Colombia:
Individual and Community Effects." Health Policy and Education 2 (3): 305-348.
Semmann, Dirk, Hans-Jürgen Krambeck, and Manfred Milinski. 2003. “Volunteering Leads to
Rock–Paper–Scissors Dynamics in a Public Goods Game.” Nature 425 (6956): 390-393.
SEWA [Self-Employed Women’s Association]. 2014. “SEWA Annual General Meeting 2014,”
We, the Self-Employed 55 (January), available at:
http://www.sewa.org/enewsletter/current-e-news-letter.asp.
Shami, Mahvish. 2012. "Collective Action, Clientelism, and Connectivity." American Political
Science Review 106 (3): 588-606.
51. 50
Sinha, Frances. 2006. Self Help Groups in India: A Study of the Lights and Shades. Gurgaon:
EDA Rural Systems Pvt. Ltd.
Upton, Caroline. 2008. “Social Capital, Collective Action and Group Formation: Developmental
Trajectories in Post-Socialist Mongolia.” Human Ecology 36 (2): 175-188.
Von Braun, Joachim, and Ruth Meinzen-Dick. 2009. “'Land-Grabbing' by Foreign Investors in
Developing Countries: Risks and Opportunities.” Policy Brief 13. International Food
Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC.
Warren, Mark R., J. Phillip Thompson, and Susan Saegert. 2005. "The Role of Social Capital in
Combating Poverty." In Saegert, Susan, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren, eds.,
Social Capital and Poor Communities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society. Vol. 2. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Woolcock, Michael, and Deepa Narayan. 2000. “Social Capital: Implications for Development
Theory, Research, and Policy.” World Bank Research Observer 15 (2): 225-249.
Wong, Susan. 2012. What Have Been the Impacts of World Bank Community-Driven
Development Programs? CDD Impact Evaluation Review and Operational and Research
Implications. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.
World Bank. 2004. World Development Report: Making Services Work for Poor People. New.
York: Oxford University Press.