Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"As this book has shown, although we have no magic bullets to eradicate poverty, no one-shot cure-all, we do know a number of things about how to improve the lives of the poor. In particular, five key lessons emerge."

"In retrospect, it is always possible to construct a rationale for what happened in each place. But the truth is, we are largely incapable of predicting where growth will happen, and we don’t understand very well why things suddenly fire up."

"Economists (and other experts) seem to have very little useful to say about why some countries grow and others do not. Basket cases, such as Bangladesh or Cambodia, turn into small miracles. Poster children, such as Côte d’Ivoire, fall into the “bottom billion.”"

"Careful understanding of the motivations and the constraints of everyone (poor people, civil servants, taxpayers, elected politicians, and so on) can lead to policies and institutions that are better designed, and less likely to be perverted by corruption or dereliction of duty. These changes will be incremental, but they will sustain and build on themselves. They can be the start of a quiet revolution."

"The focus on the broad INSTITUTIONS as a necessary and sufficient condition for anything good to happen is somewhat misplaced. The political constraints are real, and they make it difficult to find big solutions to big problems. But there is considerable slack to improve institutions and policy at the margin. "

"Whatever the reason, this viewpoint holds that bad political institutions are in large part responsible for keeping poor countries poor, and getting out of that state is difficult. Some feel this is a reason to give up; others want to impose institutional change from outside."

"Depending on their political leanings, they may blame old agrarian institutions, or the original sin from the West—colonization and its extractive political institutions—or just the unfortunate culture that countries are stuck with."

"Once the government proves that it is trying to deliver, and wins the people’s trust, a further possibility arises. The government can now afford to be less concerned with the short term, less keen to win the voters’ approval at all costs, less compelled to indulge in giveaways. This is its chance to design better and more farsighted policies."

"Many people in positions of power have mixed motives—they want to be loved or do good, both because they care and because it secures their position, even when they are corrupt. These individuals will do things to promote change, as long as they are not entirely inconsistent with their economic objectives. "

"This result suggests that a credible message can convince the voters to vote in favor of general-interest policies."

"A follow-up experiment that Wantchekon conducted before the 2006 election suggests that voters are indeed prepared to support those politicians who take seriously the job to design and explain social policies."

"Good policies can also help break the vicious cycle of low expectations: If the government starts to deliver, people will start taking politics more seriously and put pressure on the government to deliver more, rather than opting out or voting unthinkingly for their coethnics or taking up arms against the government."

"The temporary reservation of one-third of the seats for women could thus lead not only to some additional drinking water sources but also to a permanent transformation of the role of women in politics."

"The share of women elected increased to 13 percent for currently unreserved seats that had been reserved once in the past and to 17 percent if they had been reserved twice. The same thing applied to city government representatives in Mumbai.One reason for this is that voters’ attitudes toward women changed."

"In West Bengal, in GPs that had never been reserved for women leaders, 10 percent of the pradhans in 2008 were women. Not surprisingly, the share jumped to 100 percent when the seats were reserved for women. But, once a seat that had been reserved went back to being open, women were more likely to be elected again:"

"So there is no reason to believe, as the political economy view would have it, that politics always trumps policies. We can now go one step further and invert the hierarchy between policies and politics. Can good policies be a first step to good politics?"

"What these two examples (the nurses and the school committees) illustrate is that large-scale waste and policy failure often happen not because of any deep structural problem but because of lazy thinking at the stage of policy design. Good politics may or may not be necessary for good policies; it is certainly not sufficient."

"Failures are often not the result of sabotage by a specific group, as a lot of political economists would have it, but come about because the whole system was badly conceived to start with and no one has taken the trouble to fix it. In such cases, change can be a matter of figuring out what will work and leading the charge."

"Second, when what people are getting is worth a lot more than they are paying for it; for example, a hospital bed provided free to those who need it, regardless of income, invites a bribe from richer people who want to jump the queue. Third, when bureaucrats are underpaid, overworked, and not well monitored, and have little to lose by getting fired anyway. "

"The risk of corruption and neglect is thus endemic in any government, but it is likely to be more severe in three circumstances: First, in cases when the government is trying to get people to do things whose value they don’t appreciate, such as wearing a helmet on a motorcycle, or immunizing a child."

"This simple observation has two very important implications:First, there is no easy way of assessing the performance of most people who work for the government.This is why there are so many rules for what bureaucrats (or policemen,or judges) should and shouldn’t do.Second,the temptation to break the rules is ever present, both for the bureaucrat and for us, which is what leads to corruption and dereliction of duty."

"Part of the problem is that even when governments are well intentioned, what they are trying to do is fundamentally difficult. Governments exist to a large extent to solve problems that markets cannot solve—we have already seen that in many instances government intervention is necessary precisely when, for some reason, the free market cannot do the job."

"Very bad policies are sometimes born out of the best of intentions, because of a misreading of what the real problem is:"

"The important lesson is to take advantage of whatever slack there is. The same is true for policies. Policies are not completely determined by politics. Good policies (sometimes) happen in bad political environments. And, perhaps more important, bad policies (often) happen in quite good ones."

"Political economy is the view (embraced, as we have seen, by a number of development scholars) that politics has primacy over economics: Institutions define and limit the scope of economic policy."

"So politics is not very different from policy: It can (and must) be improved at the margin, and seemingly minor interventions can make a significant difference. The same kind of philosophy we have advocated throughout this book—attend to the details, understand how people decide, and be willing to experiment—applies as much to politics as it does to everything else."

"Given that all the candidates look more or less the same to voters (and perhaps equally bad), the voters may feel that they might as well vote on caste: There is a small chance that caste loyalty will pay off and the politician will help, and in any case, what do they have to lose? But many of them probably don’t feel particularly strongly about it, which is why they are also easily swayed."

"an NGO that ran a nonpartisan campaign (using street plays and puppet shows) around a simple slogan, “Don’t vote on caste, vote on development issues,” in randomly selected villages. This simple message reduced the probability that voters would choose a candidate from their own caste from 25 percent to 18 percent."

"By the 1990s, one-fourth of the members of the Legislative Assembly had a criminal case lodged against them."

"Ethnic politics is damaging for many reasons. One of them is that if voters choose based on ethnicity rather than on merit, the quality of candidates representing the majority group will suffer: These candidates don’t need to make much of an effort because the fact that they are from the “right” caste or ethnic group is sufficient to ensure that they are elected."