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AbstractThis study develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resorts to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re‐election. Using a panel dataset of 31 African countries covering the period 1980 to 2009, we test whether donor aid facilitates such political business cycles and investigate their effect on growth. We find evidence that donors, through guaranteeing support to incumbent governments, may unwittingly instigate political business cycles. With forbearance, and sometimes complicity by donors, aid seems to allow incumbent governments to instigate macroeconomic stimuli that ensure electoral victory with no fear of losing aid support. © 2015 UNU‐WIDER. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resorts to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 31 African countries covering the period 1980 to 2009, we test whether donor aid facilitates such political business cycles and investigate their effect on growth. We find evidence that donors, through guaranteeing support to incumbent governments, may unwittingly instigate political business cycles. With forbearance, and sometimes complicity by donors, aid seems to allow incumbent governments to instigate macroeconomic stimuli that ensure electoral victory with no fear of losing aid support.

Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines the impact of government spending on the social sectors (health, education, and social protection) on two major indicators of aggregate welfare (the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index and child mortality), using a panel dataset comprising 55 developing and transition countries from 1990 to 2009. We find that government social spending has a significantly positive causal effect on the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, while government expenditure on health has a significant negative impact on child mortality rate. These results are fairly robust to the method of estimation, the use of alternative instruments to control for the endogeneity of social spending, the set of control variables included in the regressions, and the use of alternative samples.

Since the turn of the Century, social protection has expanded rapidly across the Global South. The pace by which these programmes have expanded, and the type of programmes that have been adopted, vary substantially across countries. This article has two objectives: first, it provides an overview of the political economy literature of social protection adoption, focusing on the factors that the literature highlights as underpinning the adoption of social protection programmes in MICs and LICs. Second, we empirically examine these underlying determinants. Overall, we find evidence indicating that past democratization has had a positive effect on the current expansion social transfers. Electoral democracies seem to have favoured the expansion of CCTs and social pensions, whereas autocracies and infant electoral democracies have favoured pure cash transfers and public works, which are, on average, smaller in scale and are more prone to political clientelism. The level of economic development, demographic characteristics and state capabilities also matter for the adoption and scalability of social transfers.

In recent years, experimental methods have been both highly celebrated, and roundly criticized, as a means of addressing core questions in the social sciences. They have received particular attention in the analysis of development interventions. This paper focuses on two key questions: (1) what have been the main contributions of RCTs to the study of government performance? and (2) what could be the contributions, and relatedly the limits? It draws inter alia on a new systematic review of experimental and quasi-experimental studies on governance to consider both the contributions and limits of RCTs in the extant literature. A final section introduces the studies included in this symposium in light of this discussion. Collectively, the studies push beyond polarized debates over experimental methods towards a new middle ground, considering both how experimental work can better address identified weaknesses and how experimental and non-experimental techniques can be combined most fruitfully.

AbstractIn recent years, experimental methods have been both highly celebrated, and roundly criticized, as a means of addressing core questions in the social sciences. They have received particular attention in the analysis of development interventions. This paper focuses on two key questions: (1) what have been the main contributions of RCTs to the study of government performance? and (2) what could be the contributions, and relatedly the limits? It draws inter alia on a new systematic review of experimental and quasi-experimental studies on governance to consider both the contributions and limits of RCTs in the extant literature. A final section introduces the studies included in this symposium in light of this discussion. Collectively, the studies push beyond polarized debates over experimental methods towards a new middle ground, considering both how experimental work can better address identified weaknesses and how experimental and non-experimental techniques can be combined most fruitfully.