Lant Pritchett

Research: Development Assistance

Research

Development Assistance is one tactic that can promote an overall strategy for development.

I have written a number of papers and books that are relevant to the question of the structure of development assistance.

Assessing Aid. (with David Dollar). While this book has gotten most of the attention for the argument that (a) there is a differential impact of aid, such that aid only promotes development in a reasonable policy and institutional environment, and (b) attempts of donors to encourage good policies through "conditionality" have largely failed, and hence (c) greater selectivity in conditioning the bulk of the transfer of financial resources is called for. But, the book is premised on the assumption that aid is a tactic and that to be an effective tactic it has to be embedded in a development strategy. That strategy combines both a strong climate for (pro-poor) economic growth (primarily good "policies") with a strong government with capable institutions that carry out the core functions of government and deliver key services effectively.

The Structural Adjustment Debate. This paper, joint with Larry Summers, was written for, and presented at, the AEA meetings in January 1993. It addresses the issues of whether the conditionality of the Bank and Fund adjustment programs of the time were "too soft" (the view of the right) or "too hard" (the view of the left) or "just right".

It Pays to be Ignorant: A Simply Political Economy of Rigorous Program Evaluation. This paper examines the systematic incentives to avoid rigorous evaluation. It builds a model in which advocates seek to mobilize public resources and choose between persuasion without rigorous evaluation and using rigorous evaluation. In many scenarios advocates will choose not to perform a rigorous evaluation because it will be used against them politically.

Project Design/Participation

There are two papers: micro--which looks at the relation between project performance and beneficiary participation for 121 water projects, and a macro--that looks at the relationship between the performance of World Bank financed projects and country characteristics--particularly civil liberties.

Does Participation Improve Performance?: Establishing Causality with Subjective Data. (with Jonathan Isham, Deepa Narayan) World Bank Economic Review 9(2): 175-200 (1995). Uses data from121 water projects that had information about project characteristics coded ex post from project documents. Uses the feature that the project "data" was created by two independent coders to address questions of "halo effects" and the validity of the subjective rankings. Shows the empirical connections at each stage: from a design that encourages participation to more participation to improved project performance.

Civil Liberties, Democracy, and the Performance of Government Projects. (with Jon Isham and Daniel Kaufmann). World Bank Economic Review, v 11 (2). Uses the large sample of projects financed by the World Bank to show that the economic rate of return (and success rate) on government projects is higher in countries with better civil liberties (controlling for country income, education, etc.).

Ideas and other research