This book is about the institutions, incentives and constraints that guide the behaviour of people and organizations involved in the implementation of foreign aid programmes. While traditional performance studies tend to focus almost exclusively on the policies and institutions in recipient countries, this book looks at incentives in the entire chain of organizations involved in the delivery of foreign aid, from donor governments and agencies to consultants, experts and other intermediaries. Four aspects of foreign aid delivery are examined in detail: incentives inside donor agencies, the interaction of subcontractors with recipient organizations, incentives inside recipient country institutions, and biases in aid performance monitoring systems.
This article investigates the degree to which the East Germans have acted on the freedoms they gained after the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Initially, many observers expected that the East Germans would quickly take advantage of their political, religious, and economic freedoms to become as entrepreneurial, partisan, and religious as their Western counterparts. Over the past decade, however, social scientists have discovered the persistence of ‘Leninist legacies,’ arguing that the East Europeans’ socialization under communism will make them reluctant to act on the before-mentioned freedoms. Contrary to both of these expectations, we find considerable variation in the Easterners’ behavior. In the economic sphere, while the Easterners have been willing to engage in legal market activity, they have been reluctant to get involved with gray market activity. In the political realm the elites have embraced partisan politics more thoroughly than have ordinary citizens. Finally, the Easterners have flocked neither to the Catholic and Protestant churches nor to new religious movements like Scientology. These results suggest that the combination of Western rights and Eastern Leninist legacies has created a unique incentive structure in East Germany. The Easterners face a different cost-benefit calculus than do the Westerners and, as a result, at times are less willing to act on their positive freedoms.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.