Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"The clientelist speech was a clear winner: On average, the clientelist candidate got 80 percent of the votes, as opposed to 70 percent in the national unity villages."

"They are less likely to chair the village meetings, and they speak less at them. They are less educated and less politically experienced. But despite all this, and despite the evident prejudice they face, many women are quietly taking charge."

"Forcing women to run as political leaders is not the instant revolution that it is sometimes made out to be, with powerful women aggressively taking charge and reforming their villages. The women who are elected are often related to someone who was in politics before."

"Furthermore, over time, women also appear to be doing more than men with the same limited budget and are reported to be less inclined to take bribes."

"If the rules make such a difference, then it becomes very important who gets to make them. If the village is left to its own devices, it seems likely that rule making would be captured by the elite. It might therefore be better for the decentralization to be designed by a centralized authority, with the interest of the less advantaged or less powerful in mind. Power to the people, but not all the power."

"If the rules make such a difference, then it becomes very important who gets to make them. If the village is left to its own devices, it seems likely that rule making would be captured by the elite. It might therefore be better for the decentralization to be designed by a centralized authority, with the interest of the less advantaged or less powerful in mind. Power to the people, but not all the power."

"If the rules make such a difference, then it becomes very important who gets to make them. If the village is left to its own devices, it seems likely that rule making would be captured by the elite. It might therefore be better for the decentralization to be designed by a centralized authority, with the interest of the less advantaged or less powerful in mind. Power to the people, but not all the power."

"It would be tempting to conclude that the iron law of oligarchy was reasserting itself at the village level. But a small change in the rules changed everything."

"If the rules operate to exclude minorities or the poor, it is not clear that this kind of decentralization will help them or that handing power to the locality will help maintain communal harmony. On the contrary, groups that now discover they are disenfranchised by their own neighbors may in fact become angrier."

"However, in practice, the implementation of community participation and decentralization matters quite a lot. How exactly does the community express its preferences, given that different people often have different views? How can we ensure that the interests of the underprivileged groups (women, ethnic minorities, lower castes, the landless) are represented?"

"the very act of working together on a collective project may help communities rebuild their social ties after a major civil conflict."

"The new ideology in a lot of international institutions is that we should hand the beneficiaries the responsibility for making sure that schools, clinics, and local roads work well. This is usually done without asking the poor whether they really want to take on this responsibility."

"In particular, there was an increase in public health expenditures and a reduction in the number of low-birth-weight babies among less educated mothers. A seemingly minor technical fix, involving no major political battle, changed the way in which the voice of the poor was taken into account in Brazil’s political process."

"The number of invalid votes was 11 percent lower in the municipalities that introduced electronic voting than in very similar municipalities that had not yet converted to the new system. The newly enfranchised voters were poorer and less educated; the politicians they elected were themselves poorer and less educated; and the policies they chose were more likely to be targeted to the poor:"

"Although there is scope for improvement in accountability and corruption even within the framework of generally “bad” INSTITUTIONS, there is, conversely, no guarantee that good INSTITUTIONS necessarily work well in practice. Once again, it depends on how they operate on the ground."

"The idea is that any person registered in the system will be able to identify himself at any place equipped with the right finger-print-recognition equipment. Once this is done, it will be possible, for example, to require people to scan their fingerprints to take delivery of any subsidized grains from the government fair-price shops."

"Information technology could help. Led by Nandan Nilekani, who used to run Infosys, one of the country’s largest software companies, India is in the midst of an unprecedented effort to give each resident a “unique ID” number, linked to people’s fingerprints and a picture of their irises."

"A few people within the system who believe in fighting corruption may be enough."

"The Police Act of 1861 is still in effect! Since 1977, a succession of Police Reform Commissions have recommended wide-ranging changes, but implementation, so far, has been very limited. Yet the system is nowhere near as sclerotic as this history would suggest."

"The police in India represent a near-perfect example of a persistent colonial institution. Despite the fact that they were originally designed to protect the interests of the colonists, there was no attempt to reform the Indian police after Independence. "

"The government did not hire especially honest auditors—they worked within the existing system. Yet, Olken showed that the threat of audits reduced the theft of wages and materials by one-third, compared to the villages where audits were not conducted (the villages where audits were conducted were randomly selected)."

"Yet there is compelling evidence that even very imperfect local elections can make a substantial difference in how local governments are run."

"The first thing the view from below allows us to see is that it is not always necessary to fundamentally change institutions to improve accountability and reduce corruption."

"Details matter. Institutions are no exception. To really understand the effect of institutions on the lives of the poor, what is needed is a shift in perspective from INSTITUTIONS in capital letters to institutions in lower case—the “view from below.”"

"In practice, we do see a lot of significant institutional changes happening, at the margin, in the absence of an outside invasion or a full-scale social revolution."

"Easterly is consistent: He points out that freedom cannot be imposed from outside, otherwise it would not be freedom. These institutions, then, have to be homegrown and emanate from the bottom up."

"The challenge is how to get the state to do the job when avoiding the free market outcome is precisely the goal. So governments are necessary, to provide basic common goods and enforce the rules and norms that the market requires to function."

"The problem is that if the state is weak or corrupt, the free market will tend to naturally reemerge via bribes and corruption."

"Despite his aversion to experts and his claims that there are no “one-size-fits-all” solutions, Easterly has one piece of expert advice—freedom. Freedom means both as much political freedom as possible and economic freedom, “the most underrated of human inventions,” that is, free markets."

"Easterly is not pessimistic, though. He believes that countries can find their own way to success, but they need to be left alone to do so"