How Political Insiders Lose Out When International Aid Underperforms: Evidence from a Participatory Development Experiment in Ghana / Kate Baldwin, Dean Karlan, Christopher R. Udry, Ernest Appiah.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baldwin, Kate.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Karlan, Dean.

Udry, Christopher R.

Appiah, Ernest.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26930.

NBER working paper series no. w26930

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

How Political Insiders Lose Out When International Aid Underperforms

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

Participatory development is designed to mitigate problems of political bias in pre-existing local government but also interacts with it in complex ways. Using a five-year randomized controlled study in 97 clusters of villages (194 villages) in Ghana, we analyze the effects of a major participatory development program on participation in, leadership of and investment by preexisting political institutions, and on households' overall socioeconomic well-being. Applying theoretical insights on political participation and redistributive politics, we consider the possibility of both cross-institutional mobilization and displacement, and heterogeneous effects by partisanship. We find the government and its political supporters acted with high expectations for the participatory approach: treatment led to increased participation in local governance and reallocation of resources. But the results did not meet expectations, resulting in a worsening of socioeconomic wellbeing in treatment versus control villages for government supporters. This demonstrates international aid's complex distributional consequences.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2020.