Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- Note -- 2 Concepts, measures and correlations -- Introduction -- Defining governance -- Measuring governance -- Defining inequality -- Measuring inequality -- Correlations -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 3 Insights from the past -- Introduction -- Social responses to existential uncertainty -- The foundations of the rule of law -- The place of religion -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 4 Insights from social psychology and behavioural economics -- Introduction -- Ingroup bias and unethical behaviour -- Inequality, legitimacy and behaviour -- Power and corruption -- Good or bad governance as alternative social equilibria -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 5 Economic inequality and governance in contemporary societies -- Introduction -- Economic inequality will undermine good governance -- Bad governance will perpetuate economic inequalit -- Important covariates -- What does the data say? -- Economic inequality, democracy and governance -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 6 Culture, economic inequality and governance -- Introduction -- Measures of culture -- The causal links -- The impact of inequality and culture on governance -- Culture, democracy and governance -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 7 Conclusion -- What have we learnt? -- What can be done? -- Note -- Appendix: country codes and samples -- References -- Index.

Governance matters for social welfare. Better governed countries are richer, happier and have fewer social and environmental problems. Good governance implies that public sector agents act impartially. It manifests itself in the form of equality before the law, an independent and professional public administration and the control of corruption. This book considers how economic inequality - both interpersonal and interethnic - can affect the quality of governance. To this end, it brings together insights from three different perspectives. First, a long-run historical one that exploits anthropological data on pre-industrial societies. Second, based on experimental work conducted by social psychologists and behavioural economists. Third, through cross-country empirical analysis drawn from a large sample of contemporary societies. The long-run perspective relates the inequality-governance relationship to societal responses in the face of uncertainty - responses that persist today in the guise of cultural traits that vary across countries. The experimental evidence deepens our understanding of human behaviour in unequal settings and in different governance contexts. Together, the long-run perspective and the experimental evidence help inform the cross-country analysis of the impact of economic inequality on governance. This analysis suggests the importance of both economic inequality and culture for the quality of governance and yields several policy implications.

This article marshals empirical evidence from a cross-section of up to 87 countries to consider the impact of clientelism on fiscal redistribution in the form of direct taxes and public transfers. Clientelism may directly undermine fiscal redistribution towards poorer individuals because their political support is cheaper to buy, political patrons will limit redistribution to keep clients dependent and, moreover, will eschew fiscal policies that target broad categories of citizens based on explicit criteria, and favor instead private benefits that they can disburse to individual clients with a relatively high degree of discretion. The empirical analysis controls for a range of potentially confounding covariates, explores various transmission channels and accounts for the real possibility that more extensive redistributive programs may undermine the strength of clientelism. The results strongly suggest that clientelism is inimical to income redistribution towards the poor through taxes and transfers and, moreover, identify reduced public good provision as one indirect channel through which clientelism may undermine fiscal redistribution ; The author would like to thank the following projects for funding support: PID2019-104723RB-I00, PID2020-113452RB-I00 (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci´on). Open Access funding was provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Elsevier

While an individualist society prizes personal control, autonomy and individual accomplishments, a collectivist society puts a premium on loyalty and cohesion and imposes mutual obligations in the context of in-groups. It has been argued that individualism will promote economic development directly by sharpening individual incentives to invest, innovate and accumulate wealth. In this article, I argue that the individualist-collectivist dimension can also affect development through its impact on governance. The in-group favoritism inherent to collectivist societies is likely to engender corruption, nepotism and clientelism in the public sphere. In individualist societies, the relative weakness of in-group pressures and an emphasis on personal achievement and worth will contribute towards a more meritocratic and efficient public sector. My empirical evidence confirms the strong positive relationship between individualism and government quality. Moreover, I provide robust empirical evidence showing that the expected direct positive impact of individualism on economic development disappears when additionally controlling for governance, a finding which suggests that insofar as individualism affects development it does so because it promotes good governance.

SummaryInstitutional quality has been increasingly identified as crucial for economic development. In line with previous work which has explored the determinants of good institutions, this paper examines the impact of economic and social inequalities between ethnic groups on government quality. I hypothesize that greater inequalities between groups will tend to undermine institutions both because they tend to legitimize corruption in the eyes of disadvantaged groups and because of the efforts of better‐off groups to maintain their privileges. Based on a panel of 29 developing countries, I find that socio‐economic ethnic group inequalities reduce government quality, something which suggests the convenience of policies that can level the playing field in ethnically heterogeneous societies.

AbstractI integrate the notion of intrinsic motivation, applied to economics most notably byFrey (1997), into the logic of individual contributions toward collective goods as analyzed sinceOlson ([1965] 1971). This illuminates the many and various ways through which the intrinsic motivation to contribute toward such goods can be crowded out by the application of selective incentives. I suggest that the crowding‐out effect increases the cost to society of organizing the provision of collective goods and argue in favor of designing selective incentives that mitigate this effect.

SUMMARYBy allowing ethnic groups to organize areas important to them regardless of their geographic distribution, functional, overlapping and competing jurisdictions (FOCJ) have an important role to play in the management of ethnic conflict in plural societies. The functional devolution of powers which is intrinsic to FOCJ may be preferable to territorial devolution when minority groups are spatially dispersed or, when they are geographically concentrated but are in a numerical minority in their region. Even when minority groups are in a majority in their region functional rather than territorial devolution may dampen secessionist fears among members of the majority. A case can also be made for a degree of functional devolution to complement territorial devolution when territorial devolution to protect one minority leaves other ethnic groups in a minority situation. The application of FOCJ to the area of ethnic conflict management calls for institutional structures which take into account the possible efficiency of the monopoly supply of some public goods, the need to maintain 'competitive equality' among jurisdictions and the danger that the functional devolution which is inherent to FOCJ may harden group boundaries over time.

The enlargement of the European Union generates socio-economic costs and benefits for the citizens of new members and as such it is bound to affect their perceived legitimacy of the whole enterprise. The legitimacy of EU accession is likely to be enhanced by the inclusion of compensatory transfers and transition periods in the terms of accession, by the perception that EU membership represents the most favorable terms of exchange available and by the linking of accession to a sustained period of economic growth, a favorable movement in prices, improving relative incomes and the consolidation of a level playing field across new members