Ezequiel Molina

Income Polarization in Latin America: Patterns and Links with Institutions and Conflict

This paper presents a set of statistics that characterize the degree of income polarization in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The study is based on a dataset of household surveys from 21 LAC countries in the period 1989–2004. Latin America is characterized by a high level of income polarization. On average, income polarization mildly increased in the region in the period under analysis. The paper suggests that institutions and conflict interact in different ways with the various characteristics of the income distribution. In particular, countries with high income polarization and inequality are more likely to have high levels of social conflict.

Community monitoring interventions to curb corruption and increase access and quality in service delivery: a systematic review

ABSTRACT There is a belief that allowing communities monitoring power over providers could be beneficial for improving service delivery and reducing corruption in service delivery. In community monitoring interventions (CMIs), the community is given the opportunity to observe and assess providers’ performance and provide feedback to providers and politicians. This systematic review and meta-analysis appraises and synthesises evidence on the effects of CMIs on access and quality of service delivery and corruption outcomes in low and middle-income countries. The results indicate evidence of beneficial effects of CMIs on service delivery quality and on helping to curb corruption. The potential benefits of CMIs on access to and quality of services are likely to be higher when interventions are designed so that contact between both actors are promoted, and tools for citizens to monitor agents’ performance are provided. However, more rigorous research is needed to address this hypothesis.

Clientelism in the public sector : why public service reforms may not succeed and what to do about it

The World Development Report 2017 Governance and the Law (World Bank, 2017) highlights the intimate connection between the effectiveness of policy reforms and governance. The Report argues that power asymmetries play an important role in ensuring that policy reforms are credible and overcome collective action problems; with one particular manifestation being clientelism. Further, it notes that in order to expand the set of implementable policies, there is need to change the policy arena by: (a) changing incentives; (b) reshaping preferences; and (c) increasing the contestability of the decision-making process. In this background paper, The author focusses on how power structures affect incentives for policy reforms and ultimately outcomes in the context of public service delivery. Here, It have a particular power structure in mind, namely when public servants themselves hold power. In many developing countries (and beyond), public servants are not just the agents tasked with delivering services by the principal (the clients of the service, usually represented by politicians), they are also elites, in the sense that they can have direct influence on policy design and implementation. This has implications for the quality of public services: if the main purpose of the relationship between principal and agent is not to deliver quality public services, but rather to share rents accruing from public office, then service delivery outcomes are likely to be poor. Breaking such an equilibrium may be difficult and successful policy reform needs to take these kind of power constraints into consideration. In the first part make the case that public servants – aside from delivering services – may capture rents in a multitude of ways : through the allocation of jobs, through above market wages, and through low performance on the job, including with absenteeism or moonlighting. This research also suggests why public sector reform may be so difficult: if rent-sharing arises as part of a tacit agreement between politicians and public servants in which rents are transferred in exchange for political support, then any reform that tries to make public servants more accountable and reduce their rents will likely be seen as reneging on such an agreement and be met with opposition.In the second part of the paper, we review research that has focused on making public servants more accountable. This, mainly experimental literature, usually takes the political power constraints as given, and highlights the importance of information and the identity of those monitoring the public servant. We discuss to what extent such local reforms can be successful.