Farzana Afridi

Women Political Leaders, Corruption and Learning: Evidence from a Large Public Program in India

We exploit randomly assigned political quotas for women to identify the impact of women’s political leadership on corruption and on the governance of India’s largest poverty-alleviation program to date. Using survey data, we find more program inefficiencies and leakages in village councils reserved for women heads: political and administrative inexperience make such councils more vulnerable to bureaucratic capture. This is at odds with claims of unconditional gains from women assuming political office. A panel of official audit reports enables us to explore (a) whether newly elected women leaders in reserved seats initially perform worse; (b) whether they partly catch up, fully catch up, or eventually outperform (male) leaders in unreserved seats; and (c) the time it takes for such catch-up to occur. We find that women leaders in reserved seats initially underperform but rapidly learn and quickly and fully catch up with male politicians in unreserved seats. Over the duration of their elected tenure, we find no evidence of overtake. Our findings suggest short-term costs of affirmative action policies but also that once initial disadvantages recede, women leaders are neither more nor less effective local politicians than men.

Educational Attainment and Learning in India, 2004–2012

The world’s population has doubled between 1960 and 2000 and is expected to rise further by more than two billion people by 2050. Asia will not only continue to be home to the largest share of world population, but it will also have the highest ratio of working to non-working population in the world in 2050. In this chapter we focus on one country—India—poised to be the largest individual contributor to the global working-age population of 15–64-year-olds over the coming three decades. The general optimism about the coming surge in working-age population is dampened by the low quality of skills of Indias youth which makes it difficult to employ them productively. We analyse the educational attainment of the school-age population of the country—the additions to the future workforce - and highlight the serious concerns about the quality of skills being imparted to students at all levels and the depth of learning occurring in India’s educational institutions.