Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness / Michael Carlos Best, Jonas Hjort, David Szakonyi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Best, Michael Carlos.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Hjort, Jonas.

Szakonyi, David.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23350.

NBER working paper series no. w23350

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

Bureaucrats implement policy. How important are they for a state's productivity? And do the tradeoffs between policies depend on their effectiveness? Using data on 16 million public purchases in Russia, we show that 39 percent of the variation in prices paid for narrowly defined items is due to the individual bureaucrats and organizations who manage procurement. Low-price buyers also display higher spending quality. Theory suggests that such differences in effectiveness can be pivotal for policy design. To illustrate, we show that a common one--bid preferences for domestic suppliers--substantially improves procurement performance, but only when implemented by ineffective bureaucrats.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2017.