Anders Olofsgård

We designed and randomly evaluated the impact of a textbooks for self-study scheme in eastern DRC targeting student achievement in primary schools. Students in treatment schools were seven percentage points more likely to pass the national exam, and those who passed obtained higher scores. We also evidence higher scores on a French language test. The effects are primarily driven by student interest in textbooks, frequency of doing homework and motivation to go to school and continue education. Student achievement can thus be improved by intensified and diversified use of existing learning materials in poor and fragile settings.

We estimate the community-level impact of foreign aid projects on women's empowerment in the country with the most complete recent record of geo-coded aid project placement, Malawi. Our estimates can thus be interpreted as the average impact of aid from many different donors and diverse projects. We find that aid in general has a positive impact, in particular on an index of female agency and women's sexual and fertility preferences. Gender-targeted aid has a further positive impact on women's sexual and fertility preferences , and more tentatively on an index focusing on gender-based violence. However, the positive impact of gender-targeted aid disappears in patrilineal communities, and men's attitudes towards female agency in the areas of sexuality and fertility are even negatively affected. This suggests that donors need to consider that the impact of aid on female empowerment can depend on the community context when they decide on aid project design and placement.

Objective
The middle class has historically played a decisive role in mass movements and rebellions against the status quo, including in both peaceful and violent protests that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa following the events of the Arab Spring. Yet, we know little about why the middle class tends to be over-represented in protest movements, or why that protest takes nonviolent versus violent forms.

Methods
We develop a model in which protest constitutes a “costly” signal of discontent, where violent actions are more costly than peaceful demonstrations and where the cost of action increases with individual income. Under such assumptions, the upper-middle class will engage in nonviolent protest, the lower middle class will support violence against the government, while the poorest and richest will abstain from opposition activities.

Results
Survey data from the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll across 20 Arab countries supports these hypotheses. Using both parametric and semi-parametric analyses, we find that participation in nonviolent protests and general strikes rises from the first (lowest) and peaks at the fourth income quintile, then declines thereafter. Meanwhile, support for political violence rises sharply between the first and second quintiles, falling for individuals in the upper quintiles. Our findings are robust to broader measures of wealth and status, as well as to corrections for regime type, levels of regime support, and joint determination of anti-regime behaviors.

Conclusions
These findings shed light on why certain socioeconomic groups engage in anti-governmental behaviors, while others do not, and suggest that income subgroups within the middle class may choose different modalities of protest.

We test the hypothesis that aid recipient governments are better able to utilize aid flows for political favoritism during periods in which they are of geo-strategic value to major donors. We examine the effect of a country’s (non-permanent) membership on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the subnational distribution of World Bank aid. Specifically, we analyze whether World Bank projects are targeted to subnational regions in which the head of state was born, or to regions dominated by the same ethnic group as that of the head of state. We find that all regions within a recipient country, on average, receive a greater number of aid projects during UNSC membership years. Moreover, a leader’s co-ethnic regions (but not birth regions) receive significantly more World Bank projects and loan commitments during UNSC membership years compared to other years. This effect is driven chiefly by interest-bearing loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). Most importantly, we find stronger subnational political bias in aid allocation for aid recipients whose UNSC votes are fully aligned with those of the United States, indicating that exchanges of aid for favors occur in multilateral settings. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Rysslands angreppskrig mot Ukraina har tydliggjort vad många under lång tid befarat: Putins målsättning är ett återupprättande av en geopolitisk maktordning från Sovjettiden. En sådan ordning är helt oacceptabel och skulle ha långtgående konsekvenser för europeisk ekonomi och säkerhet. För att förstå situationen och konsekvenserna av t ex sanktioner är det viktigt att ha en tydlig bild av den ryska ekonomiska modellen under Putin. Likaså är det viktigt att man har klart för sig varför det är avgörande att ge Ukraina fullt stöd.

In many low- and middle-income countries, the quality of public goods available to the poor is inadequate. We report findings from a unique combination of a village-randomized controlled trial and a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment involving the establishment of “self-help” groups in one of the poorest districts in India. The presence of these groups improved villagers’ access to and quality of certain critical local public goods, in particular, water. Our evidence suggests that the underlying mechanisms responsible were better information provision through the groups, stronger engagement by members in village governance, and lower coordination costs. Public goods games played in a subset of control and treatment villages four years following the start of the intervention, additionally, indicate that cooperative norms are stronger in villages where self-help groups were present. We find little evidence that membership leads to a convergence of tastes among group members. These results suggest that, in contrast to traditional participatory development programs, self-help groups can build durable social capital that can improve government performance in poor communities.

We look at the growth experience of 25 transition countries over the 25years since the dissolution of the USSR. The initial collapse in income was much more severe in 12 former Soviet Union countries (FSU12) than in the 10 transition countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 (EU10). In 2015, FSU12 income levels were further behind EU10 than they were at the start of transition, despite more rapid growth in the last 15years. Compared to predictions from a parsimonious growth model, the region as a whole is normal' in terms of growth performance since the 2000s. However, the FSU12 over-perform and the EU10 under-perform relative to model predictions for the last 15 years.

We argue that the tilt toward donor interests over recipient needs in aid allocation and practices may be particularly strong in new partnerships. Using the natural experiment of Eastern transition we find that commercial and strategic concerns influenced both aid flows and entry in the first half of the 1990s, but much less so later on. We also find that fractionalization increased and that early aid to the region was particularly volatile, unpredictable and tied. Our results may explain why aid to Iraq and Afghanistan has had little development impact and serves as warning for Burma and Arab Spring regimes. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

To avoid strikes and to curb labour militancy, some governments have introduced legislation stating that union leadership as well as wage offers should be decided through union-wide ballots. This paper shows that members still have incentives to appoint militant union leaders, if these leaders have access to information critical for the members’ voting decisions. Furthermore, conflicts may arise in equilibrium even though the contract zone is never empty and there is an option to resolve any incomplete information. Ballot requirements hence preclude neither militant union bosses nor inefficient conflicts.

Arrangements by which politically connected firms receive economic favors are a common feature around the world, but little is known of the form or effects of influence in business–government relationships. We present a simple model in which influence requires firms to provide goods of political value in exchange for economic privileges. We argue that political influence improves the business environment for selected firms, but restricts their ability to fire workers. Under these conditions, if political influence primarily lowers fixed costs over variable costs, then favored firms will be less likely to invest and their productivity will suffer, even if they earn higher profits than non-influential firms. We rely on the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys of approximately 8000 firms in 40 developing countries, and control for a number of biases present in the data. We find that influential firms benefit from lower administrative and regulatory barriers (including bribe taxes), greater pricing power, and easier access to credit. But these firms also provide politically valuable benefits to incumbents through bloated payrolls and greater tax payments. Finally, these firms are worse-performing than their non-influential counterparts. Our results highlight a potential channel by which cronyism leads to persistent underdevelopment.