Current development assistance prioritizes results and evaluative schemes used to generate them as the most effective way of delivering aid by presenting these results as evidence of accomplishment. Aid recipients and donors respond with a crafty tactic, which we term the “numbers game.” They generate results to satisfy assessment expectations irrespective of actual service delivery or satisfaction of the local population. This tactic yields both external and internal legitimacy: recipient countries legitimize their access to external funds while external actors sustain the aid enterprise that is under persistent scrutiny. In-depth interviews, observation, and existing data on everyday life of municipal councils in Ghana lend support to the preeminence given to results-based aid (RBA) in the numbers game. Startlingly, the expected impact targeted by the scheme is strategically set aside so that more capacity gaps are created and hence the need for more RBA resources to address. A delicate balance between results and on-the-ground impact is required for such intervention to have effect.

Briefly reviewing the evolution of the field of women development, the author argues that the field has lost the dynamism characteristic of earlier periods of constructive tension between theory and practice that led to the adoption of the gender and development framework and the incorporation of issues of multiculturalism, human rights, and political participation into a field that had largely been defined in economic terms. Today, however, critical theory is caught in an “anti-neoliberal” position that is increasingly outdated and that has interpreted women’s work, individual agency, and the role of the state in ways that hinder rather than facilitate new thinking and better outcomes for women participants in WID/GAD projects and programs.

This article presents three related findings on regional decentralization. We use an original dataset collected in Uganda to establish, for the first time in a developing country context, that individuals have meaningful preferences over the degree of regional decentralization they desire, ranging from centralism to secessionism. Second, multilevel models suggest that a small share of this variation is explained at the district and ethnic group levels. The preference for regional decentralization monotonically increases with an ethnic group or a district’s average ethnic attachment. However, the relationship with an ethnic group or district’s income is U-shaped: both the richest and the poorest groups desire more regionalism, reconciling interest-based and identity-based explanations for regionalism. Finally, we show that higher individual ethnic attachment increases preferences for regionalism using fixed effects and a new matching method.

Digital Development Games (DDGs) have been designed to tackle a variety of international development issues, including gender inequality. This study uses critical textual analysis and a political economic approach to highlight how the development goals embedded in two games, Family Values and Moraba, both aimed at gender equality in Africa, were shaped by the large donor organizations that funded them. Understanding the relationship between game developers and funders is necessary in order to understand how and why DDGs work to reinforce established, and often problematic, development narratives. As smaller nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and independent game developers look to large development institutions to support the production of DDGs, research on the ways in which the ideologies of funding organizations get mapped onto games becomes increasingly important. Further, the findings of this study provide a contemporary example of the ways in which development networks are able to incorporate new technologies and discourses into their work without fundamentally changing their worldviews or their approach to creating change.

Previous work suggests that remittances enable governments to reduce spending on public services and divert resources to serve their own interests. We argue this need not occur. Building on recent work which shows that the impact of remittances is contingent on the domestic environment in remittance-receiving countries, we hypothesize that (1) remittances are more likely to increase government spending on public services in democracies than in autocracies and (2) remittances are more likely to finance activities that deter political competition in autocracies than in democracies. Using a sample of 105 developing countries from 1985 through 2008, we find strong support for our hypotheses when examining the impact of remittances on public education, health, and military spending. We also provide suggestive evidence for the mechanism underpinning our results: micro-level evidence on remittance recipients’ preferences and political engagement.

Death and disease exacts a heavy toll on citizens in many democracies. I argue that the funding and distribution of health policy in democracies are subject to political economic distributive pressures. Patterns of partisanship, strategic importance, and quality of legislative representation condition the provision of public health funding within countries. In turn, public health spending alters district mortality outcomes. I assemble administrative district level data for late Third Republic France and model its health funding and mortality rates. Political importance, not need, plays a prominent role in determining who lives and dies in democracies. In an environment analogous to modern developing countries but absent international political pressures, my results demonstrate that poor health is not just a consequence of lack of funding but also domestic political economy incentives.

Microcredit transactions in developing countries create risks for borrowers that are routinely overlooked in the literature. This paper argues that common microfinance-lending methodologies that allow lenders to collateralize loans and unilaterally collect this security create opportunities for malicious lenders to steal from clients in good standing. In places where any lender can simply call itself a "microfinance institution" (MFI), opportunistic lenders can use the halo effect associated with microfinance to encourage borrowers to make themselves unusually vulnerable to theft. Evidence of these abuses can be seen in a case study of Uganda, where theft and fraud by a small number of microfinance institutions created a large-scale crisis and contributed to a precipitous decline in trust in the financial sector as a whole. Even when it occurs only on the margins of the sector, I conclude, this type of opportunism may have problematic implications for all MFIs and undermine efforts to increase financial inclusion. This possibility provides a new impetus to consider innovative regulatory approaches for microfinance.

The theory of urban bias was a major contribution to the evolution of contemporary theories of political economy that remains highly relevant today. Yet theorists of urban bias have still not produced a general explanation that accounts for anomalous cases of what we call “rural incorporation,” or coalition strategies based on modest rural producers. These anomalous cases suggest that the collective action underpinnings of urban bias theory underdetermine outcomes. This paper advances a new explanation of the anomalous African cases of Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, and Zimbabwe. After detailing the costs of rural incorporation, we theorize the conditions that would motivate state elites to overcome their pro-urban biases and offer substantial material benefits to non-elite agrarian producers. Rural incorporation is an optimal strategy only when state elites are locked in unusually intense conflict with their rivals. Most nationalist movements in Africa did not meet this condition and their leaders followed pro-urban policies. The three outliers are all cases of settler colonialism: bitter rivalry between European settlers and native planters created the conditions for rural incorporation. We show how native planters and their political allies selected rural incorporation as a political-economic instrument of commercial competition and political supremacy. Case studies of Ghana and Nigeria demonstrate that in the absence of political and economic rivalry with settlers, African leaders selected the “default” strategy of urban bias.

Why did China and India, despite their similar natural factor endowments and growth trajectories, attract different types of FDI? This article shows that microlevel institutions in China and India, particularly a set of regulations governing labor and land markets, shape their domestic labor mobility and consequently affect their FDI patterns and development paths. China’s high labor mobility motivates foreign firms to concentrate in labor-intensive manufacturing and exploit the benefits of scale economies. India’s low labor mobility motivates foreign firms to move away from unskilled-labor-intensive manufacturing and invest in the modern service sector where the demand for skilled labor is relatively high.