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Although research has established the importance of state capacity in economic development, less is known about how to build that capacity and the role of external partners in the process. This paper estimates the impact of a typical development project designed to build state capacity in a low-income country. Specifically, it evaluates a multilateral development bank project in Tanzania, which incentivized investments in local state capacity by offering grants conditional on institutional performance scores. The paper uses a difference-in-differences methodology to estimate the project impact, comparing outcomes between 18 project and 22 non-project local governments over 2016-18. Outcomes were measured through two rounds of primary surveys of nearly 500 local government officials and nearly 3,000 households. Over the course of the project, measured state capacity improved in project areas, but due to comparable gains in non-project areas, the project's value-added to change in state capacity is estimated to be zero across all the dozens of relevant variables in the surveys. The data suggest that state capacity is evolving in Tanzania through endogenous changes in trust and legitimacy in the country rather than from financial incentives offered by external partners.

Decentralization --- Governance --- National Governance --- Performance-Based Financing --- Public Sector Development --- State Capacity

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Institutional Roots of India's Security Policy presents high-quality analytical examinations of several foreign policy and national security institutions spread across four domains: the armed services, intelligence, border and internal security, and policy and coordination to offer insights on their organizational and institutional foundations.

National security --- India, state capacity, governance, national security, Indian foreign policy, public institutions, organizational effectiveness

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In 2019, an Independent Evaluation Group review on the growing use of social contracts terminology by the World Bank concluded that social contract diagnostics are useful analytical innovations with relevant operational implications, particularly in situations of transition and social unrest. But it also found that the World Bank had no formal, conceptual framework or shared understanding of social contracts, leading to uneven quality of use. This paper proposes a framework and quantitative measures to describe social contracts. First, the paper presents a literature review on social contract theory and its applications in development. Second, it proposes a conceptual framework based on three core aspects of social contracts: (i) the citizen-state bargain, (ii) social outcomes that form the contents of the social contract, and (iii) resilience of the social contract in terms of how citizens' expectations are being met. Third, an empirical measurement strategy is described to quantify these aspects through six dimensions and 14 subdimensions using available indicators from multiple sources. An empirical analysis then successfully tests some of the framework's predictions and finds indicative evidence for an operationally interesting result: that state capacity without civil capacity is often not sufficient to generate thicker and more inclusive social contracts, and that these better outcomes lead to less misalignment with expectations and to less social unrest. Fourth, the quantitative measures are used to present three comparative maps for the general characterization of social contracts at the cross-country level.

Civil Society --- Governance --- Institutions --- National Governance --- Political Economy --- Social Accountability --- Social Capital --- Social Contract --- Social Development --- State Capacity

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The relative return to input-augmentation versus inefficiency-reduction strategies for improving education system performance is a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, this paper shows that the large investments over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In the data, 23.6 percent of teachers were absent during unannounced visits with an associated fiscal cost of USD 1.5 billion/year. There are two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel ata that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Simulations using these results suggest that investing in better governance by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing teacher-student contact time (net of teacher absence) than hiring more teachers. Thus, at current margins, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public spending in India are likely to yield substantially higher returns than those that augment inputs.

Education for All. --- Education. --- Educational Populations. --- Effective Schools and Teachers. --- Governance. --- Monitoring. --- Primary Education. --- State Capacity. --- Teacher Absence. --- Teacher Absenteeism. --- Tertiary Education.

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The relative return to input-augmentation versus inefficiency-reduction strategies for improving education system performance is a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, this paper shows that the large investments over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In the data, 23.6 percent of teachers were absent during unannounced visits with an associated fiscal cost of USD 1.5 billion/year. There are two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel ata that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Simulations using these results suggest that investing in better governance by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing teacher-student contact time (net of teacher absence) than hiring more teachers. Thus, at current margins, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public spending in India are likely to yield substantially higher returns than those that augment inputs.

Education for All. --- Education. --- Educational Populations. --- Effective Schools and Teachers. --- Governance. --- Monitoring. --- Primary Education. --- State Capacity. --- Teacher Absence. --- Teacher Absenteeism. --- Tertiary Education.