A critical view of the US military's interventionist policies rationalized using "utopian" development agendas, as seen in the US Army Stability Operations Field Manual.
Studies
William Easterly / Iraq, Afghanistan, USA / 2009
Joanne Yoong / India / 2008
From the abstract: "We study the impact of decentralizing reforms in the district-health system on a critical public health intervention, routine childhood immunization, in Madhya Pradesh, one of the largest and poorest states in India."
Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effects of Brazil's Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes
Claudio Ferraz, Frederico Finan / Brazil / 2008
From the abstract: "This paper uses publicly released audit reports to study the effects of disclosing information about corruption practices on electoral accountability."
William Easterly / Global / 2008
From the article: "A large research program in economics has established a persuasive link between institutions and economic development. But what does this imply for development policymaking? Can a political leader or aid agency seeking to promote development readily change institutions?"
William Easterly / Global / 2008
In lieu of the unpredictability of growth and development, and the subsequent inability to find or create "development experts", Easterly argues that "economic and political freedom" - as described by Friederich Hayek - is the key to allowing self-driven development.
Abhijit Banerjee, Rohini Pande / India / 2007
From the abstract: "This paper examines how increased voter ethnicization, defined as a greater preference for the party representing one's ethnic group, aspects politician quality."
Benjamin Olken / Indonesia / 2007
From the abstract: "This paper presents a randomized ?eld experiment on reducing corruption in over 600 Indonesian village road projects... Overall, the results suggest that traditional topdown monitoring can play an important role in reducing corruption, even in a highly corrupt environment."
Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna, Sendhil Mullainathan / India / 2007
A randomized control trial investigated the relative difficulty or ease of obtaining a driver's license in Delhi. The authors find that the license testing system suffers from corruption, in that a financial bonus for obtaining a license outperformed actual driving skill measures.
Martina Bjorkman, Jakob Svensson / Uganda / 2007
From the abstract: "This paper analyzes the importance of strengthening the relationship of accountability between health service providers and citizens for improving access to and quality of health care. How this is to be achieved, and whether it works, however, remain open questions. The paper presents a randomized field experiment on increasing community-based monitoring...The findings on staff behavior suggest that the improvements in quality and quantity of health service delivery resulted from an increased effort by the staff to serve the community. Overall, the results suggest that community monitoring can play an important role in improving service delivery when traditional top-down supervision is ineffective."
Paul Collier / Global / 2007
Collier examines fifty "failed states" - countries, often underemphasized in the media and mainstream development policy, who are dropping further into absolute poverty and suffer from corrupt governments.
