:::

【AEW webinar】Social Protection in Developing Countries: Lessons from Indonesia & Service Delivery, Corruption, and Information Flows in Bureaucracies: Evidence from the Bangladesh Civil Service


  • 研討會日期 : 2021-10-28
  • 時間 : 08:30
  • 主講人 : Professor Rema Hanna & Martin Mattsson
  • 地點 : Register and join online
  • 演講者簡介 : Professor Hanna received her Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005. She is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South-East Asia Studies and Chair of the International Development Area at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research revolves around improving the provision of public services in developing and emerging nations, particularly for the very poor. Professor Mattsson received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 2021. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Economics at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on how formal and informal institutions shape behavior and socio-economic outcomes. .
  • 演講摘要 : Government bureaucracies in low- and middle-income countries often suffer from corruption and slow public service delivery. Can an information system – providing information about delays to the responsible bureaucrats and their supervisors – reduce delays? Paying bribes for faster service delivery is common, but does improving average processing times reduce bribes? To answer these questions, I conduct a large-scale field experiment over 16 months with the Bangladesh Civil Service. I send monthly scorecards measuring delays in service de-livery to government officials and their supervisors. The scorecards increase services delivered on time by 11% but do not reduce bribes. Instead, the scorecards increase bribes for high-performing bureaucrats. These results are inconsistent with several existing theories of the relationship between service delivery and corruption. I propose a model where bureaucrats’ shame or reputational concerns constrain corruption. When bureaucrats’ reputation improves through positive performance feedback, this constraint is relaxed, and bribes increase. Over-all, my study shows that improving information within bureaucracies can change bureaucrats’ behavior, but that positive feedback can have negative spillovers on bureaucrats’ performance.