Mick Moore

On kinship structure female autonomy and demographic behavior in India.

The main states of India are broadly grouped into 2 demographic regimes. In contrast to states in the north southern states are characterized by lower marital fertility later age at marriage lower infant and child mortality and comparatively low ratios of female to male infant and child mortality. The division between the 2 regimes broadly coincides with the division areas of northern kinship/low female autonomy and southern kinship/high female autonomy. The analysis suggests that family social status is probably the most important element in comprehending Indias demographic situation. Women in the south tend to be more active in the labor force are more likely to take innovative action in adopting fertility control and are more apt to utilize health services for themselves and their children. Changes in India are also compared to those other South Asian countries. (authors modified) (summaries in ENG FRE SPA)

Revenues, State Formation, and the Quality of Governance in Developing Countries

Sources of state revenue have a major impact on patterns of state formation. This proposition from fiscal sociologyis valid and convincing in the context of western European history and comparisons among contemporary states in the South. This article investigates the extent to which we can conclude that the quality of governance in contemporary developing countries might improve if states were more dependent for their financial resources on domestic taxpayers. The radically different context of contemporary third-world states cautions against too firm conclusions.

Institutionalised Co-production: Unorthodox Public Service Delivery in Challenging Environments

In developing countries in particular, services are often delivered through unorthodox organisational arrangements that cannot simply be dismissed as relics of ‘traditional’ institutions, or as incomplete modern organisations. Some have emerged recently, and represent institutional adaptations to specific political and logistical circumstances. We need to expand the range of organisational categories that are considered worthy of study and develop a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of unorthodox arrangements. The concept of institutionalised co-production provides a useful point of entry. Institutionalised co-production is defined as: the provision of public services (broadly defined, to include regulation) through a regular long-term relationship between state agencies and organised groups of citizens, where both make substantial resource contributions. We explain some varieties of institutionalised co-production arrangements; explore why they appear to be relatively so widespread in poor countries; and relate the concept to broader ideas about public organisation.

Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries: Capacity and Consent.

OUTLINE Introduction Taxation is a core governance function. It has the potential to shape relations between state and society in significant and distinctive ways. Tax revenues allow states to provide security and public goods. “The history of state revenue production,” Margaret Levi declared, “is the history of the evolution of the state (1988: 1).” For these reasons, taxation should be accorded a central role in analyses of state building. There is a large historical literature, relating especially to Western Europe (and a smaller, but conceptually rich, political science literature on the interaction between states and citizens over taxes (Tilly, Levy, Bates, etc.). Yet although the subject of state building is now high on academic and policy agendas, the relationship between state-building and taxation in the developing world has received almost no sustained scholarly attention.

Proliferation and fragmentation: Transactions costs and the value of aid

Abstract The problem of the proliferation of the number of aid donors and aid channels continues to worsen. It is widely and plausibly believed that this significantly reduces the value of aid by increasing direct and indirect transactions costs. We contribute to the existing literature by: (a) categorising the apparent adverse effects of proliferation; (b) producing a reliable and fair indicator of the relative degree to which the main bilateral donors proliferate or concentrate their aid; (c) giving some explanation of why some donors proliferate more than others; (d) constructing a reliable measure of the extent to which recipients suffer from the problem of fragmentation in the sources of their aid; and (e) demonstrating that the worst proliferators among the aid donors are especially likely to be suppliers of aid to recipients suffering most from fragmentation. There are significant implications for aid policy.

Political Underdevelopment: What causes ‘bad governance’

The states of the ‘South’, although diverse, tend to be underdeveloped in the political sense: neither authoritative and effective nor legitimate and accountable to citizens. The conventional response of aid donors is institutional transfer : trying to align the institutional configurations of Southern states even more closely with those of Northern polities. This may not be the best approach. The political underdevelopment of much of the South largely results from the ways in which Southern states have been created and political authority shaped through economic and political interactions with the wealthier countries of the North. Political underdevelopment is an outcome of uneven (economic) development. A better appreciation of the nature of these processes could lead to more appropriate policy. History cannot be reversed. But more attention could be paid to the ways in which Northern states currently help sustain political underdevelopment in the South, notably by perpetuating the conditions under which state elites in the South can remain too independent of their own citizens.

The fruits and fallacies of neoliberalism: The case of irrigation policy

Abstract Neoliberal doctrine provides the analytic basis for a convincing explanation and critique of irrigation policy in the Third World. There is a strong case for subjecting capital and recurrent decisions to the discipline of scarcity pricing. However, it is rarely practicable to apply scarcity pricing rigorously because of the economic and technical infeasibility of volumetric water pricing in most Third World irrigation schemes. The Taiwanese experience illustrates that political and institutional mechanisms for promoting managerial performance can be effective where the neoliberal prescription fails.

Revenue authorities and public authority in sub-Saharan Africa

Since the early 1990s, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have established semi-autonomous revenue authorities (ARAs), organisationally distinct from ministries of finance, with some real operational autonomy, and with staff paid at rates substantially higher than those in comparable public sector jobs. This has been seen by some observers as a step to dilute the power of the central state executive. We demonstrate that this is a misreading of the story of revenue authorities in Africa. Both African governments and the international development agencies involved in the reforms see ARAs as a means of increasing central government revenues, and thus enlarging the authority of the (central) state. To date, there is little sign that the creation of revenue agencies has actually increased public revenues. It has, however, facilitated a range of reforms in the ways in which taxes are assessed and collected, and deflected pressures that might otherwise have emerged for substantial privatisation of tax collection.

Thoroughly Modern Revolutionaries: The JVP in Sri Lanka

The JVP (Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna—the Peoples Liberation Front) first came to the attention of the world outside Sri Lanka when it launched an abortive insurrection in 1971. In 1987, the JVP made another bid to come to power by force of arms. The insurrection of 1987–1989 was better-prepared and more deeply-rooted than that of 1971; the human costs and societal consequences of its extirpation were correspondingly greater. Although the JVP came close to achieving state power both in late 1988 and mid-1989, it was thereafter destroyed very rapidly.

The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan ‘Peasantry’

The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the smallholder sector. In this and in related respects the traditional plantation-smallholder dichotomy has been weakening. Yet in another important respect there has been no convergence between the two sectors. The plantation sector has remained fully capitalist in the commonsense meaning of that term, while capitalist relations of production appear to have made few further inroads into the smallholder sector. True that a great deal of the labour used in smallholder production is hired. But that has long been the case. The evidence suggests that since World War Two the small family farm has at least held its own as the dominant form under which land is owned and managed. This has happened despite rapid population growth on a terrain already densely populated.