GlobalDev has partnered with the 2024 Oxford Forum for International Development to launch a special series on Conflict and Development. This series aims to scrutinize current manifestations of conflict, mechanisms of post-conflict reconstruction, and the roles of policy, diplomacy, and humanitarian endeavors in fostering resilience and rebuilding communities.

We invite you to draw upon both your research and the research you have access to, to write a blog article on the topic of conflict and development. Blog posts should be around 800 words with a focus on any of the following key points (the list is indicative and not exhaustive):

• Conflict-sensitive development approaches
• Peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts
• Humanitarian assistance in conflict zones
• Economic recovery and development in post-conflict settings
• Gender dynamics in conflict and development
• Environmental degradation and conflict
• The role of technology in conflict prevention and resolution
• Indigenous perspectives on conflict and development
• Youth engagement and empowerment in conflict-affected areas

GlobalDev looks for accessible contributions that make use of existing research to shed light on some of the most urgent policy challenges facing the world today. We do not publish extended abstracts of single research publications or highly technical content, and we very rarely accept op-ed styled contributions. We ask you to discuss and hyperlink as many research sources as appropriate to illuminate the policy challenge you decide to frame your contribution around.

Please read our style guide carefully before writing, and submit your article through our ‘Write for Us’ page. All questions should be submitted to editors.globaldevblog@gdn.int.

The post Call for Contributions: Conflict and Development appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

For research donors interested in international development, recent years have been packed with interesting discussions about how funding could or should change. What is interesting here is the idea that changing the way funding works can have an effect on equity, on opportunity, and indeed on research impact. In other words, many of these discussions contend that research funding could work much better to address development needs. To contribute to this debate, GlobalDev is partnering with the UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR). We’re seeking to bring to the fore the critical knowledge that researchers and funders have generated on funding approaches in recent years. We hope to share existing evidence and evidence-informed opinions on this niche topic, to further illuminate the practice of donors of all kinds (international, national, private and public). We are open to contributions from both research funders and researchers. If you have additional questions you would like to ask (and answer), please write to us.

There are several areas of contention surrounding research funding approaches. To start with, research funders care increasingly about research impact on development policy and practice. Impact, however, is itself a topic of research, with no clear benchmark for how to use it in research funding decisions (which, by definition, happen before any impact is even foreseeable). What is the emphasis on impact doing to the research funding landscape? 

Another area of debate is how close funders should be to the realities their funding aims to illuminate, and how flexible they should be to account for developments on the ground. Can a balance be struck between ambition, scope and a good knowledge of local systems? How is the imperative of closeness to the development setting likely to affect the research funding landscape?

Much debate also continues on who development research funding is really meant for. Large Northern research funders often make it a condition for the funding to be managed by their own national institutions, and ‘helicopter research’ remains common. Most often, researchers in in low- and middle-income countries (irrespective of their qualifications and capacity) are still cornered in the subsidiary role of ‘local partners’ or targeted by ‘capacity building’ budgets. Is there a ‘nationalism’ in the development of research funding practices, and how does it affect research?

Finally, much of the research funded by international donors ends up behind paywalls, with so-called developed country[1] researchers being able to access it much more easily than anyone else. Can the increasing pressure to seriously pursue open-access policies help tackle the systemic inequities in development research?

Here, we’ve outlined just some of the complexities and controversies that arise around research funding approaches. Drawing on their own experience, we invite researchers and research funders to write a blog about the impact of funding approaches on research. Blog posts should be around 800 words with a focus on any of the following key points (the list is indicative and not exhaustive):

1. How, if at all, does an emphasis on research impact affect what research gets funded?

2. To what extent are so-called developing country[2] researchers involved in the funding process and can this be improved upon?

3. As a researcher or funder, can you envision a mechanism for making research funding less fragmented?

4. How can funding approaches better support so-called developing country researchers and help build a more equitable research landscape?

[1] So-called developed countries refer to high-income economies that a GNI per capita of $13,846 or more in 2022

[2] So called developing countries refer to low- and middle-income countries with a GNI per capita of $13,845 and less in 2022

The post Call for contributions: Can current research funding approaches make a difference? appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

By 2030, conflict-affected countries could be home to up to two-thirds of the world’s extremely poor. It is, of course, crucial for policymakers to understand which factors increase the risk of violence to help countries escape or avoid conflict.

Many studies show that sudden falls in income, or ‘income shocks’, can increase the risk of local conflict in developing countries.  

We recently analyzed the findings of 64 studies that looked at links between income and conflicts at a local level. Looking at all these studies gave us a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the topic that could help guide related policies. However, we also find evidence of biases in research that we believe policymakers should know of.

The sources of conflict: unpacking the systematic effects

Factors that significantly contribute to conflict risk in developing countries include those that threaten economic prospects and incomes for active (or potential) warring groups and individuals. These include sudden and hard-to-predict events, such as commodity price changes and climate fluctuations.

Research in our analysis suggests that having higher incomes and better economic opportunities in the agricultural sector can reduce the risk of conflicts in local areas. However, having lower incomes in this sector does not consistently increase the risk of conflict. This means that factors other than income, like grievances (such as feelings or perceptions of injustice, resentment, or dissatisfaction resulting from real or perceived mistreatment, unfairness, or violation of rights) and the ability of the government to maintain order, do indeed affect the risk of conflicts locally.

For example, the impact of climate events on conflicts is not solely related to changes in agricultural income. Additionally, having higher incomes and economic opportunities in the extractive sector, like oil or mineral industries, does not consistently increase the risk of conflict at the local level.

However, it’s important to consider that different studies may have different results based on the specific factors they examine or the methods they use. For example, studies that focus on negative events, like floods or droughts, or those that look at crimes such as robberies or assaults, tend to report a higher risk of conflict. On the other hand, studies that have stricter publication processes or which analyze smaller geographic areas tend to report a lower risk of conflict.

Furthermore, studies that focus on positive events related to hydrocarbons or minerals often find a lower risk of conflict, especially when they focus on a single country or include larger samples.

Biases in research

Our analysis highlights problems with biases in research, which can distort our understanding of the local effects of income shocks on conflicts. Many studies are valuable despite biases, but we advise policymakers to be aware that they may only be seeing part of the picture, and to be cautious of generalizing the results of conflict studies. This is especially true when considering whether to apply policies to countries outside the study area.

To explain further, conflict studies are not immune to publication bias. This is a common issue across all types of research, whereby scientific journal editors are more likely to publish studies with results that follow a certain pattern. They may reject other, perfectly good, studies because the results are not ‘spectacular’ enough or do not follow a certain narrative, for example.

In our case, we find that studies which report significant links between income shocks on conflicts are more likely to be published than those that find no connection. Research focusing on links between conflict and income shocks in the agricultural sector is particularly susceptible to this type of bias, especially studies that look at income shocks caused by environmental problems.  

Furthermore, researchers themselves are biased. Researchers who look at agricultural problems and conflict-inducing mechanisms are susceptible to a form of confirmation bias that drives them to find stronger associations between income shocks and conflict risks. As a consequence, they are less likely to produce studies with counterintuitive results (i.e. studies that show a reduction in conflict risk following an income shock). Rather, they are more likely to produce studies that show an increased risk of conflict.

Lastly, our analysis highlights what looks like a ‘negativity bias’ in academia’s approach to income and conflicts. Indeed, nearly 70% of studies focus on the detrimental effect of income shocks on conflict – many more than look at positive effects. Compounding this distortion, journals favor studies that show a higher risk of conflict following a fall in income.

Ultimately, our analysis calls for more research into the mechanisms that link income shocks to local risk of conflict. A better understanding of these will lead to more effective peacemaking policies.

The post The ‘shocking’ origins of conflict in developing countries appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

In 2019, the Lancet Commission described a ‘global syndemic’, referring to the interaction between three pandemics prevalent even before Covid-19 – obesity, undernutrition, climate change – and their clustering in time and place.

The term syndemic has also been defined as the aggregation of two or more diseases or other health conditions in a population that interact synergistically and converge with their social, economic, cultural, and socio-environmental determinants, exacerbating the negative health effects of any or all of the diseases involved. Among non-communicable diseases (NCDs) identified in this syndemic interaction are obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), NCDs tend to be long-term and result from a combination of multiple factors: genetic, physiological, environmental, and behavioral. These chronic diseases cause 71% of deaths globally, with a major impact on low-and middle-income countries.

Recommendations to accelerate countries’ responses have been incorporated in the WHO’s Global Action Plan for prevention of NCDs – for example, strengthening cooperation in public sector governance, multisectoral actions to accelerate responses at the national level, and actions to reduce risk factors and underlying social determinants.

But it is necessary to consider that the different countries and regions operate under very different contexts in relation to progress with their economic prosperity, human health, social equity, and environmental sustainability.

In Mexico, the 2018–19 national health and nutrition survey showed that overweight and obesity are highly prevalent in both rural and urban areas (see Table 1). In addition, 10.3% of the adult population have been diagnosed with diabetes, and the prevalence is higher among women (11.4%) than among men (9.1%); while the prevalence of high blood pressure is 18.4% among people aged 20 and above, and again higher in women (20.9%) than in men (15.3%).

Table 1: Prevalence (%) of overweight and obesity in the Mexican population

Figure 1 shows data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) for the period from 1990 to 2019, indicating the increasing mortality rate associated with these three types of metabolic risk: high body mass index, high blood pressure, and high fasting plasma glucose.

Figure 1. Mortality rate associated with three metabolic risks in the Mexican population from 1990 to 2019.

Among strategies that have been implemented to diminish the high prevalence of NCDs at the national level, there is ‘front-of-pack’ labeling of food and beverages, which came into force from 2020. This consists of five black and white labels used to indicate whether a certain foodstuff is high in calories, sugars, saturated and trans fats, and sodium. It is similar to mandatory food labeling in Chile.

The strategy is complemented with ‘back-of-pack’ nutrition labeling, as part of an initiative among OECD countries where this is the most common form of labeling. But additional policies to promote health are needed, for example, community actions focused on influencing lifestyles through information and education.

The most recent reform of the Law of General Education in Mexico was implemented in 2021. The Article 75 states that educational authorities must prohibit the sale of foods with low nutritional value and high calorie content at school facilities.

In addition, they must promote healthy lifestyles that prevent and counteract overweight and obesity among students, including physical activities, school sports, physical education, and good nutritional habits. But these provisions must be actively monitored and evaluated to ensure compliance, and adjustments made based on the evidence and results obtained in the short, medium, and long term.

Moreover, strategies to prevent NCDs by reducing environmental risks are urgently required in key sectors, such as air pollution, water pollution, transport systems, and food and agriculture systems. These should include models that promote physical activity in public places, such as work centers, schools, hospitals, and parks, as has been recommended by the WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to increase the resilience of affected communities and encourage a culture of prevention across society as a whole.

The CDC have identified four domains as priorities for prevention of NCDs: epidemiological and surveillance, socio-environmental approaches, healthcare system interventions, and community programs linked to clinical services. In the case of Mexico, these could be complemented by strengthening the healthcare system’s capacity for treatment of NDCs, training programs for health workers with a syndemic approach, prevention strategies, and development of new technologies for early detection.

Finally, intersectoral coordination through an integrative syndemic framework is crucial for tackling the impacts of the syndemic on vulnerable groups and the community, and to reduce the high prevalence of NCDs. The initiative might involve collaboration of different Mexican government ministries, such as Health, Education, Science and Technology, Economy, Work and Social Security, Environment and Natural Resources, Agriculture and Rural Development. It should also involve working together with non-government organizations (NGOs) and industry.

The post Non-communicable diseases: keys to prevention and control appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Your blog post can focus on any of the following areas (the list is indicative and not exhaustive):

• Global picture: ODA, sustainable development, SDGs, anthropological and technological revolution, decision making in a complex world, digital revolution, knowledge revolution, etc. • Climate and energy transition: Energy, climate change

• Territorial and ecological transition: urban development, environmental degradation, natural resource management in all sectors, biodiversity mainstreaming, actions for sustainable living

• Demographic and social transition: demographic trends, migration, gender issues, poverty, inequality, education, health, the future of work, cultural issues, vulnerability and fragility, conflict prevention

• Economic and financial transition: growth, development finance, trade, structural transformations

• Political and civic transition: governance, corruption, political regimes, political participation

• Methodological issues: development measurements, concept of transition, measures of wellbeing, prospective

• Emerging approaches: Sustainability science or Sustainability Transitions Research

Please read our one pager and style guide before writing and send us your article at editors.globaldevblog@gdn.int.

This blog series is organized in partnership with the Transition in the Global South initiative. Dr. Bipashyee Ghosh, Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, will be joining the review panel for this series as a guest editor. The series is a prolongation of a video contest launched by the Agence Française de Developpement (AFD) and the Global Development Network (GDN) in 2021. 

The post Call for contributions: Global Transitions in Development appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Public investment is critical to build and maintain physical infrastructure, to increase productivity, and to promote long-term economic growth. The case for public investment is even stronger now in the wake of the global pandemic. According to International Monetary Fund estimates, every 1% GDP increase in public investment could expand the GDP by 2.7%, creating jobs and supporting faster economic recovery from Covid-19.

But historical experience indicates that sharp accelerations in public investment have often fallen short of expectations. While there is evidence that public capital can indeed contribute to growth, especially in the case of infrastructure investment, analysis of past episodes suggests a certain degree of skepticism about the real effect of scaling up public investment on output growth.

For example, there is no dearth of anecdotes about bridges and roads to nowhere. A more systematic look at evidence on past public investment booms reveals that they ended with higher public debts and little or no long-run growth dividends. Consistent with this result and with the presence of absorptive capacity constraints, evidence based on project-level data shows that projects’ outcomes worsen in periods of public investment scaling-up.

The notion of absorptive capacity is related to technical capacity, waste and leakage of resources in the investment process – all of which affect project selection, management, and implementation constraints. Absorptive capacity embeds the idea of declining marginal returns, but also stresses the role that binding supply bottlenecks can have on rates of return on public investment in the short run, when the skills, institutions, and management required to reap the benefit of additional investment cannot be expanded.

Development practitioners consider technical skills, administrative and organizational capacity, government effectiveness, and the political environment as the main drivers of absorptive capacity.

While this body of research – as well as anecdotal evidence – suggests weak real economy effects of public investment booms, mostly because of a variety of inefficiencies related to public investment spending, not much is said about the actual mechanisms that can weaken the responsiveness of output to public investment during a boom.

In a recent study, we argue that one potential mechanism behind the limited economic returns of large public investment episodes could be rapid cost inflation – a situation in which project unit costs increase sharply because of rising marginal costs of public investment management. ​​As public investment programs grow, so does the marginal cost of managing them, because of the shortage of skills and tighter construction markets and supply constraints, among other factors.

Weaknesses in the institutional framework to manage public investment manifest themselves in payment delays to contractors, contract cancellations, and design changes and renegotiations. Project-level data across several continents show that cost over-runs are very common. Widely cited estimates, for example, report that 86% of projects have over-runs, with actual costs exceeding estimated costs by an average of 28%.

Figure 1 provides an example of a sharp acceleration of public investment in Vietnam, which led to a rapid expansion in the stock of infrastructure. The inefficiencies resulting from such surges in public investment can lead to critical weaknesses. A study of ​Vietnam’s infrastructure constraints​ notes that the ‘apparent inability of heavy investment to solve infrastructure constraints is explained by the fact that a disproportionate number of infrastructure projects, particularly those in the transport sector, are economically non-viable but approved under political pressure with inflated costs’.

Figure 1: Public investment surge episodes in Vietnam

Notes: The chart plots the sharp acceleration of public investment in Vietnam. Data are from the Investment and Capital Stock Dataset, published by the International Monetary Fund (2015, 2019​).

In addition, the broad set of technical and managerial resources required to implement several investment projects, which often cannot be expanded in the short run, could lead not only to cost inflation, but also to delays in project implementation and completion. For example, recent analysis shows that notwithstanding the prevalence of delays across countries (about 60% of projects are delayed by at least one year), delays are more pronounced in countries with weaker institutions and in periods of public investment scaling-up.

In our analysis, we zoom in on the relationship between public investment and the unit costs of road construction, using project-level data for more than 3,300 road construction projects undertaken in a large sample of countries. In this way, we can estimate the association between the size and speed of public investment scaling-up and the unit costs of roadworks.

We focus on road infrastructure as it is a key component of infrastructure spending, and it is critical to reducing trade costs and promoting development, structural transformation, and urbanization.

Three main results stand out:

First, there is a U-shaped relationship between public investment and project unit costs, with an inflection point close to 10% of GDP, suggesting rising marginal costs of governance associated with increasing public investment levels. This result holds after controlling for a wide range of project characteristics, geographical features, financing instruments, and other factors that may drive project costs.

Second, cost inflation kicks in at different public investment levels, depending on a country’s public investment efficiency – a proxy for the quality of public investment management. In particular, for low-efficiency countries, unit costs start increasing when public investment is above 7% of GDP, while for high-efficiency countries, this threshold is at 10% of GDP. These results are economically meaningful, given that over the period from 2013 to 2015, average public investment was above 7% of GDP in 32% of developing countries, and above 10% of GDP in 15% of developing countries.

Third, unit costs rise sharply during investment booms. For example, scaling up public investment from 8% to 15% of GDP is associated with a 38% increase in unit costs in low-efficiency countries vis-á-vis only a 3% increase in high-efficiency countries.

Our analysis points to the existence of a minimum efficient scale for public investment management. Investment portfolio mixes are particularly inefficient when investment programs are small. Such programs are likely to target portfolios dominated by ‘prestige projects’ with limited social value and comparatively higher unit costs.

As programs and investment portfolios expand, the mix and availability of projects is more balanced, including both affordable and sustainable projects. These changes are likely to lower unit costs. But as investment budgets expand further, the marginal cost of governance rises, as appraisal capacity does not grow at the same pace as the size, number and specificity of the projects.

The policy implications of these findings call for a gradual scaling-up of public investment consistent with a country’s absorptive capacity. Strengthening public investment management institutions is critical to reap the greatest return from any additional dollar of public infrastructure spending.

Reform priorities include implementing well-designed project selection and prioritization criteria, setting up a robust project appraisal process, improving the credibility of multi-year budgeting, developing an effective framework to manage the risks involved in public-private partnerships, strengthening project management, and ensuring that national and sector plans can effectively guide public investment decisions.

The post Public investment for growth: a country’s absorptive capacity is key appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Global Transitions, Southern Voices 

The post Video Contest | Southern voices on global transitions appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

‘It would be transformative if everybody voted – that would counteract money more than anything.’ So said former US president Barack Obama in a 2015 speech. In democracies, voting is citizens’ primary tool to ensure that government policies represent their interests and to hold public officials accountable. Episodes like the introduction of electronic voting in Brazil or the Voting Rights Act in the United States show that higher electoral participation significantly affects representation and policy outcomes.

Yet voter turnout has been dwindling worldwide for the last 30 years. In many countries in the Americas, for example, almost half of the electorate failed to vote in recent presidential elections. What’s more, we have limited knowledge of whether there are large-scale public policies that would be effective in mobilizing voters.

First, some of the most robust predictors of voter turnout (such as weather) are not immediately amenable to public policy. Second, although an extensive body of research on voter mobilization initiatives (such as Get-Out-The-Vote) has provided substantial evidence, most of it corresponds to field experiments with limited geographical scope and short duration. Large-scale policies are affected by various issues that are hard to study through these experiments.

So how can we increase voter participation at scale? And will this affect representation?

How about a fine for not voting?

Many policy advocates have suggested introducing compulsory voting, abstention fines, or monetary incentives to vote. In a recent study, we examine voters’ responses to government-provided monetary incentives to vote in Peru, a middle-income country with more than 20 million voters.

Voting has been mandatory in Peru since 1933, with those who fail to vote facing restricted access to government services and having to pay a fine. Unsurprisingly, turnout has regularly exceeded 80%. Until 2006, the value of the fine was the same throughout the country and also relatively high (at around $90).

A reform that year classified districts into three categories (high, medium, and low fine) and differentially reduced the fine to $45, $23, and $11, respectively. The reform was a compromise between the desire to preserve the high levels of voter turnout attributed to compulsory voting, and concerns about a high and homogeneous fine disproportionately affecting the more impoverished population.

A comparison of districts with different fine levels before and after the reform reveals that a lower fine decreases voter turnout. Figure 1 plots average turnout in high and low fine districts (relative to the medium fine districts in the 2006 presidential run-off). In the elections after the reform (2011 and 2016), we estimate that a 10 Peruvian Sol fine reduction (around $3) leads to a 0.5 percentage point drop in turnout.

FIGURE 1

Policies ‘in the wild’ do not work the same way as tightly run experiments

Our estimate is substantially smaller than the one from a field experiment in the same setting that involved a door-to-door information campaign about the fine’s modified value. It is not uncommon for experimental interventions to experience such a ‘voltage drop’ when scaled up. Often, this is a result of changes in the quality or incentives faced by personnel or the perils of very large-scale program implementation.

We assume (and provide evidence) that informational frictions play a large role – that is, voters not knowing about the change in regulation. This is a pervasive problem affecting policies that change the rules governing the interaction of citizens with the state without communicating the changes adequately.

Monetary incentives are not crucial for compulsory voting to work

People aged 70 or older are exempt from compulsory voting in Peru. Figure 2 shows voter turnout by age group (relative to age 69) in 2016. While people in their sixties vote at a roughly constant rate, turnout dramatically declines for those aged 70 or older, though only in Peru and not in neighboring Chile (which does not have compulsory voting).

Our estimates imply that a full reduction of the fine would lead to a drop in turnout only 18% as large as the one caused by this age exemption. This suggests that non-monetary incentives (for example, the ‘expressive function of the law’) are the main drivers behind the effectiveness of compulsory voting.

FIGURE 2

When voting is easy, decreasing the value of the fine hardly affects electoral outcomes

We find that a smaller abstention fine decreases blank or invalid votes. For every 10 extra votes caused by a larger fine, we see 8.6 more votes that are blank or invalid. Our findings suggest that in a setting where citizens face few barriers to electoral participation (automatic registration, voting on Sundays, etc.), abstention is driven by unsatisfied, uninformed, or uninterested voters. Forcing them to vote hardly affects representation.

Nevertheless, there are many countries in which turnout remains worryingly low, despite the absence of significant barriers (for example, just 54% in Colombia’s 2018 presidential election). For these countries, our findings suggest that the introduction of a mandate to vote can be a powerful tool to promote electoral participation, even with very low fines that do not overburden those who do not comply.

The post The effectiveness of monetary incentives to vote appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Courts have typically played a central role at critical inflection points in any democracy’s trajectory by interpreting the constitution, statutes, and policies in relation to evolving social, economic, and political contexts. While this can put the courts at odds with those currently in government, a strong judiciary lends legitimacy to state institutions in the long run.

Many Supreme Court and High Court judgements shape the way an economy functions by complementing the role of statutes and policies. For example, the decision in the case of Azad Rickshaw Pullers Union v. Punjab, 1980 by the Supreme Court of India circumvented the potential unemployment of many low-income rickshaw-pullers who, under a new state law, had to own rickshaws instead of the hitherto rental approach to obtaining licenses to ply.

The decision provided a new scheme to convert rickshaw renters into owners by increasing their access to bank loans. This would address the issue of employment as well as preserving the objective behind the law of preventing exploitative practices in the existing rental market.

In addition to the importance of such judgements by Supreme Courts and High Courts, which set precedents for other lower courts to follow, the functioning of ordinary trial courts at sub-national level matters for the day-to-day functioning of society.

For example, property litigation concerning land ownership disputes and debt recovery disputes form the bulk of civil litigation at this level. Timely resolution of such disputes generates trust in contracts and protects property rights.

Concerns about trial court capacity is not only warranted in developing economies but also in OECD countries such as Italy and Greece where the state of backlogs in courts and time to trial resolution display a worrying pattern with respect to per capita GDP (see Figure 1). But little has been examined about this empirically, in order to identify which factors inhibit trial court capacity and the returns on investments in capacity improvements to inform policy.

Figure 1: Correlation between GDP per capita and resolution time in trial courts

Early research in this area examines historical judicial institutions in explaining the efficiency of modern courts using aggregate data. This work highlights the role played by procedural formalism influenced by whether English common law or French civil law served as the historical base for modern practice.

Later research, including my own, has demonstrated that court congestion in the form of a mounting backlog of litigation significantly affects development outcomes through credit markets, firm performance, and supply-chain linkages.

Court congestion and subsequent delays in trial resolution can be caused by several factors. First, trial courts adjudicate disputes across multiple issues, spanning property disputes to debt recovery to divorce petitions.

One solution could be specialized courts, such as debt-recovery or bankruptcy courts. Indeed, one study finds that such specialized debt recovery tribunals help to speed up bank loan repayment in India. This subsequently improves credit market outcomes in terms of greater loan circulation at lower interest rates.

Second, congestion can be caused by inadequate staffing and/or the varying extent of territorial jurisdiction. One study shows that district courts with jurisdiction over a greater number of municipalities in Brazil are more severely congested, which affects their ability to enforce bankruptcy reforms.

A more common cause of congestion is judge vacancies, which is ubiquitous across many developing countries. One of my studies makes use of the quasi-random nature of such vacancies occurring over time within district courts in India to establish its causal relationship to the speed of backlog resolution. Figure 2 shows this relationship, implying that reducing judge vacancies has an immediate and persistent effect in increasing backlog resolution.

Judge vacancies during the life cycle of a litigation process affect the plaintiffs more than the defendants. This is likely to have distributional consequences, particularly when plaintiffs tend to have fewer assets relative to defendants, as Figure 3 shows.

Furthermore, as Figure 4 shows, these capacity constraints in judicial staffing also affect the enforcement of subsequent bankruptcy reforms in India (similar to the Brazilian context), which in turn affects the potential misallocation of credit in such jurisdictions.

Figure 2: Relationship between judge strength and trial resolution rate

Figure 3: Firms with lowest assets are more likely to use trial courts for justice as plaintiff whereas respondents are more likely to be richer firms.

Figure 4: Left graph shows a reduction in lending to defaulting borrowers and right graph shows that in addition to reduction in lending to defaulting borrowers, lending to clean borrowers increase in districts with better judge strength.

Third, effective case-flow management practices to streamline the life cycle of litigation can alleviate congestion. In the context of civil and commercial courts in Dakar, Senegal, research finds that setting strict timelines for different stages of the litigation processes significantly reduces the time to resolution.

But over time these effects from supply-side policies may be short-lived if demand for litigation responds to an increase in capacity over the long run. A recent study finds that plaintiffs are overconfident about their likelihood of victory in the context of Mexican labor courts, and they continue to file petitions instead of opting for out-of-court settlements. The researchers show that this behavior can be corrected significantly by providing adequate information at the time of filing.

While regulatory hurdles have received attention as barriers to economic growth through Doing Business rankings and other initiatives, state capacity concerns focused on the judiciary have typically escaped prominence. They require attention as one of the top issues on the policy reform agenda.

Even without incurring significant public spending to address the constraints of the judiciary, simple reforms such as fixing vacancies, attracting high quality talent, and reducing incentives for litigants to delay cases could be low cost yet high return investments.

The current state of research in this area is only scratching the surface. We need a lot more empirical evidence and policy-research partnerships examining the judiciary to produce generalizable knowledge of the kind that has been produced for development in education and health.

The post Investing in courts to build state capacity for development appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

People respond to incentives, and politicians are no different. The way that elections are designed can drive the platform and policies of a candidate just as much as any other factor. Through these platforms, politicians tailor how and whether they appeal to different groups of voters.

Economists talk about the integral role of ‘inclusive institutions’ – those that encourage broad political participation – in governance and long-term growth. But what does this mean in practice? How do we create inclusive institutions?

The central argument here is that electoral design is a key component in creating inclusive institutions and, by extension, economic development. When elections encourage elected representatives to represent a broad group of voters rather than a specific narrow group of voters, politicians then have incentives to provide public goods that benefit a broader constituency once in office.

Electoral rules shape political incentives

One aspect of electoral design directly links political strategy to representation: electoral rules. Electoral rules define how what voters want is translated into political representation. These formulas can create incentives for politicians to appeal to broader constituencies.

How exactly does this work?

Compare single-round and two-round systems. In a single-round system, voters vote once and the candidate with the most votes wins. In a two-round system, voters first vote and if no candidate receives a majority, they vote a second time between the top two candidates.

This distinction means that to win in a two-round system, candidates not only have to obtain the most votes (which could be as little as, say, 30% in a single-round system) but they must also obtain at least 50%. The intuition is that for a politician, every vote is more valuable and it becomes costly to ignore certain groups of voters. In order to win, candidates must adopt strategies to appeal to broader groups of voters.

This logic can be applied to other electoral rules, such as proportional systems and the electoral college. For example, the electoral college works against encouraging majority representation: candidates can win with only 25% of the vote (by winning 50% of the vote in 50% of districts).

Theoretical research suggests that electoral rules affect incentives and have implications for governance. More recently, empirical studies are finding the same.

Case study: single- and two-round systems in Brazil

A variety of electoral rules are used around the world to select political representatives. For executive positions in presidential systems, these generally fall under two systems: single-round and two-round systems.

My research studies the implications of single-round and two-round systems in Brazilian municipal elections. Brazil employs a unique rule, where municipalities below 200,000 registered voters elect their mayor in a single-round election, and where municipalities above this threshold elect their mayor in a two-round election.

Do politicians in two-round elections represent broader groups of voters? First round vote counts at each polling station indicate that voters in two-round municipalities are less geographically concentrated (see Figure 1). This decrease only occurs among the top two candidates: whoever wins ultimately represents a geographically broader constituency.

Figure 1: Overall concentration of voters for specific candidates, as measured by the coefficient of variation index

Two-round elections foster inclusiveness along another dimension: voters are more engaged in the political process and cast significantly fewer blank and invalid ballots.

But electoral design is not a useful policy tool for economic development if this does not lead to differences in economic policy. In Brazil, it appears that these differences during the election do translate into policy: once in office, politicians elected in two-round elections provide more resources to public schools (see Figure 2) and distribute these resources more equitably across schools. This lower inequality is driven by additional resources going to the poorest schools in the municipality.

Figure 2: Levels of school equipment resources, as measured by a school’s national percentile rank in resource levels

But are politicians simply pandering to groups of voters in inconsequential ways? The evidence suggests not. Two-round municipalities also experience improved educational outcomes: dropout rates are lower and literacy rates higher among cohorts who were of school age during the electoral term.

How do we move forward with this?

Politicians have ideologies, but they also respond to incentives. Thoughtful design of elections can make the political system, and subsequent economic policy, more inclusive by generating incentives for politicians to appeal to broader groups of voters.

Two-round systems can lead to more inclusive representation. Other voting rules that approximate requiring majorities to win may lead to similar results, such as ranked-choice voting.

But transforming the political system requires huge political will. In the face of political constraints, countries should not disregard smaller, incremental policy changes. Policy tools that make it more difficult for politicians to win with narrow groups of voters – such as ones that reduce personality politics or limit the number of candidates in single-round elections – can generate meaningful steps towards making the political process more inclusive.

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