Latest Resources
Democratic governance, citizenship, and legal identity
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Justice, Latin America and the Carribean, Public Administration, Civil SocietyLegal identity is about being a citizen and one’s sense of belonging and ability to exercise their rights and obligations. This working paper presents new empirical findings on the problem of under-registration in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region and discusses the emerging academic concepts and project development. Internationally, people without identification documents are...
Monitoring governance: lessons from international experience
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Justice, Public Administration, Inter-Governmental OrganizationThis paper develops a set of governance monitoring tools on the basis of international experience. In contrast to efforts to develop a single governance rating, this approach seeks to collect and propose a range of different instruments and procedures under a single umbrella designed to enhance the capacity to monitor government performance. The paper begins with a definition and...
Institutionalisation Of Government Evaluation: Balancing Trade-Offs
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Latin America and the Carribean, Public Administration, Civil SocietyCarefully designed and implemented evaluations can improve people’s welfare, and enhance development effectiveness. The paper investigates institutions in Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, and shows that for the successful inception of an institutionalised system for evaluation, three common factors stand out: the existence of a democratic system with a vocal opposition, the...
A Panel Study on the Relationship Between Corruption and Government Size
Article / Working Paper, Corruption, Democracy, Parliament, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankUsing panel data from 1996 to 2005, this paper shows that the effect of government size on corruption is positive at a low level of democracy, but it is negative at a high level. This finding could fill the gaps in previous studies whose findings on the relationship between corruption and government size are controversial. The results on the effect of government size on...
Democratic Reforms, Foreign Aid and Production Inefficiency
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Political Parties, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis paper uses a theoretical model and employs panel data techniques to answer a simple question: what is the impact of foreign aid on the production inefficiency of the recipient country conditional on its political governance. We define inefficiency as the distance between the actual production and its potential level given the available input resources and technology. Much of the recent...
Off Track? Findings from South Africa’s First APRM Implementation Report
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Corruption, Democracy, Public Administration, Civil SocietyThis paper summarises and analyses the First Report on the Implementation of South Africa’s African Peer Review Mechanism Programme of Action (Implementation Report). Although the Implementation Report was initially praised at the African Union Summit in January 2009, a closer look reveals many of its faults and deficiencies. It appears that the report was rushed in order to meet a...
Institutionalisation Of Government Evaluation: Balancing Trade-Offs
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Latin America and the Carribean, Public Administration, Academic/Think Tank, Civil SocietyCarefully designed and implemented evaluations can improve people’s welfare, and enhance development effectiveness. This paper investigates institutions in Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, and shows that for the successful inception of an institutionalised system for evaluation, three common factors stand out: the existence of a democratic system with a vocal opposition, the existence of...
Geography, Institutions and Human Development: A Cross-Country Investigation using Bayesian Model Averaging
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Asia and the Pacific, Democracy, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis paper examines the role of long standing institutions – identified through geography, disease ecology, colonial legacy, and some direct measures of political and economic governance – on human development and its non income components across countries. The study employs a novel econometric technique called the Bayesian Model Averaging that allows us to select the relevant...