"Strengthening Fragile States: Evidence from Mobile Salary Payments in Afghanistan" (with co-authors: Joshua Blumenstock, Anastasiia Faikina, Stefano Fiorin, Tarek Ghani)
Status: This talk is in preparation - details may change
Status: This talk has been cancelled
Effective bureaucracies know who their employees are and honor their payment contracts. Advancing these capabilities presumes confidence that the state will continue to exist, which as a definitional matter is not assured in fragile states. We report results from a randomized evaluation of a major Afghan government initiative to modernize its payment system. The reform, which required teachers to biometrically register and receive salary payments via digital payments both made employees more legible to the state and significantly reduced delays. The reform also improved educational outcomes and increased formal financial inclusion for employees. The benefits were not immediate – highlighting the importance of long time-horizons – and took longer in rural and more contested areas. The reform was also implemented with higher quality in districts both where citizens were confident that the government would prevail against the Taliban and where there was a relative consensus about that fact. The results indicate that public confidence in future stability is an important complement to investments in basic state capacity in fragile settings.
Date: 11 October 2023, 11:00 (Wednesday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2023)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Seminar Room A
Speaker: Michael Callen (LSE)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Organisers: Jean-Paul Carvalho (University of Oxford), Noam Yuchtman (University of Oxford)
Part of: Political Economy Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Booking url: https://forms.office.com/e/ePEjpdWeBB
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Emma Heritage, Shreyasi Banerjee, Edward Clark