How do citizens in developing countries access public services? Scholars study this question by emphasizing the role of government, measuring government performance as household access to public services, such as clean water and sanitation. However, the authors argue that the state does not hold a monopoly on provision of such utilities: Citizens in developing countries often turn to nonstate providers for basic utilities. In Mexico, the authors find that direct money transfers from migrants, known as remittances, are used to provide household access to public services. The statistical analysis across Mexico’s 2,438 municipalities demonstrates that citizens improve their own access. The results also contribute new evidence to the literature on remittances and development by offering a micro-level explanation for how remittances affect both the availability and the source of basic utilities. The findings suggest that the measures scholars typically associate with government performance may in fact capture nonstate provision of basic utilities.
When does aid foster development after civil war? A testable model is needed to account for the uneven outcomes in postconflict development. This article proposes and empirically tests the novel nonstrategic-desperation hypothesis, an explanation based on the varied incentives that fragile postconflict governments face when confronted with donor development goals. Paradoxically, incentives to meet development goals only exist when donors have little strategic interest in the recipients and when recipients lack income from resource rents and are therefore desperate for income. Ten-year data on infant mortality changes following civil wars ending 1970-96 and a variety of robustness checks support the hypothesis. By focusing on how income sources constrain the choices of aid recipients, and how these constraints can provide incentives to meet donor development goals, the nonstrategic-desperation hypothesis explains how the good use of aid can take place following civil war, when institutions are weak.
Conditions on aid agreements aim to increase aid effectiveness, and are, therefore, an important component of aid agreements. Yet little is known about why aid-recipient governments comply with these conditions. Some scholars have suggested a strategic-importance hypothesis: recipients comply when donors enforce conditions—and donors enforce conditions when recipients are not strategically important. However, there are many cases where strategically important countries comply with conditions and strategically unimportant countries fail to do so. We argue that to explain compliance, we must also understand how the desire to maximize revenue from major income sources, such as FDI and natural resource rents, changes the recipient's incentive to comply. Using data on World Bank records of compliance from 1964 to 2010, we find strong support for our hypotheses even after accounting for different model specifications and potential endogeneity. Paradoxically, donors can secure compliance from recipients for reasons unrelated to the promise of additional aid.
Why are some dictators more successful at demobilizing protest movements than others? Repression sometimes stamps out protest movements (Bahrain in 2011) but can also cause a backlash (Egypt and Tunisia in 2011), leading to regime change. This article argues that the effectiveness of repression in quelling protests varies depending upon the income sources of authoritarian regimes. Oil-rich autocracies are well equipped to contend with domestic and international criticism, and this gives them a greater capacity to quell protests through force. Because oil-poor dictators lack such ability to deal with criticism, repression is more likely to trigger a backlash of increased protests. The argument is supported by analysis of newly available data on mass protests from the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO 2.0) dataset, which covers all countries (1945–2006). This article implies that publics respond strategically to repression, and tend to demobilize when the government is capable of continually employing repression with impunity.
Differences in colonial institutions appear to explain divergent patterns of political and economic development across former colonies. However, the origins of colonial institutions are not well understood. This article hypothesizes that variation in colonial labor institutions can be explained by both pre-colonial indigenous governance and the resource promise of colonies. We derive the hypotheses using a game-theoretic framework that emphasizes constraints facing profit-maximizing colonists. We test the hypotheses using an original dataset of natural resources and labor and tribute institutions from the pre-colonial and colonial periods for 455 sub-national territories in the Americas. The data are consistent with the hypotheses. Existing arguments about the national origin of colonists receive mixed support from the data. The article suggests that political and economic development today is a consequence of both natural resources and indigenous institutions, and therefore predates European colonialism.
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