Why do politicians distort public investments? And given that public investments are poor because presumably that is what is politically rational, what types of reforms are likely to be both efficiency improving and compatible with the interests of politicians? This paper explores these two...

This paper takes advantage of unique intra-country variation in the Philippines power sector to examine under what conditions politicians have an incentive to "capture" an electric utility and use it for the purposes of rent-seeking. The authors hypothesize that the level of capture is...

This paper studies the relationship between devolution, accountability, and service delivery in Pakistan. It examines the degree of accessibility of local policy-makers and the level of competition in local elections, the expenditure patterns of local governments to gauge their sector...

Using a cross-country data set on e-government systems, this paper analyzes whether e-filing of taxes and e-procurement adoption improves the capacity of governments to raise and spend resources through the lowering of tax compliance costs, improvement of public procurement competitiveness, and...

This paper examines the public sector wage premium using nationally representative household surveys from 91 countries. The public sector generally pays a wage premium compared to all private sector salaried employees, but the size of the premium is sensitive to the choice of the private sector...

This Paper examines the impact of the political party structure on the incentives for politicians to focus on patronage versus service delivery improvements in Pakistan. By analysing inter-provincial variations in the quality of service delivery in Pakistan, the paper argues that the more...