Political Connections and Social Networks in Targeted Transfer Programs: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

Caeyers, Bet; Dercon, Stefan

doi:10.1086/665602

Cited by 67 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…-Iddir‖ is a social network that pervades both rural and urban communities in Ethiopia. While its primary function is providing group-based informal insurance, researchers find that it also plays a critical role in overcoming market imperfections by expediting the flow of information within and beyond the village, reducing monitoring and enforcement costs (Berhane et al, 2009;Abay et al, 2014) and developing trust among agents (Caeyers and Dercon, 2012). In some casea, via institutional arrangements nested within it, it corrects coordination failures in the management of communal natural resources (Stellmacher and Mollinga, 2009).…”

Section: Econometric Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decentralization, market integration and efficiency-equity trade-offs: Evidence from Joint Forest Management in Ethiopian villages

Gelo

Muchapondwa

Koch

2016

JFE

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Extant literature on Joint Forest Management (JFM) impact evaluation has concluded that it generally does not provide sufficient incentives to justify the costs that forest use restrictions impose on local people. However, there is a dearth of evidence concerning whether alternative JFM intervention with improved market linkages for non-timber forest products has similar implications. In this study, we evaluated the income and distributive effects of a JFM program in Ethiopia in which additional support was provided for improved market linkages for non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Exploiting exogenous variation in customary rights across eligible groups of communities that participate in JFM programs, as well as using heteroskedasticitybased instrumentations, we identified the income and distributive effects of the program. Our analysis shows that the program has raised the income of the households who chose to participate by approximately 400 Ethiopian Birr or 26% of per capita expenditure; that result was robust to various specifications. We also found that this effect is largely driven by marketing incentives to use non-timber forest products. However, we found that the program's benefit is * We thank associate editor, Professor Arild Angelsen, and the reviewer for their comments. We are grateful to Volkswagen Foundation and University of Johannesburg for funding postdoc fellowships of the first author and Economic Research Southern Africa for its support of this research. We also gratefully acknowledge generous financial support of EfD (EDRI/ EEPFE) SIDA for collection of the data used for analysis of this paper. 1 biased toward the upper end of the income distribution, a result that points to the inequalityreinforcing effects of the program.

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Section: Econometric Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decentralization, market integration and efficiency-equity trade-offs: Evidence from Joint Forest Management in Ethiopian villages

Gelo

Muchapondwa

Koch

2016

JFE

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“…Several studies [12][13][14][15][16] acknowledge the promotive and protective functions of informal mutual support arrangements: before or ex ante, during, and after crisis or ex post situations or shocks. Communities forming such arrangements tend to exhibit better recovery from shocks [16] and need public emergency assistance less urgently than those communities without such arrangements [17]. Nonetheless, studies on resilience, disaster management policy, and practices have yet to fully embrace indigenous mutual support arrangements as a vital component in addressing vulnerability [18][19][20][21][22] against livelihood shocks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing Social Capital for Resilience to Livelihood Shocks: Ethnographic Evidence of Indigenous Mutual Support Practices among Rural Households in Eastern Ethiopia

Endris

Kibwika

Hassan

et al. 2017

International Journal of Population Research

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In the absence of adequate support from formal social safety nets, rural households in Ethiopia have developed collective risksharing strategies to buffer them against adverse livelihood shocks, thus building their resilience capacities. Social capital and network based indigenous mutual support arrangements are the most important strategies that are institutionalized and widely practiced among rural households for centuries in Ethiopia to support households to cope with shocks. Nonetheless, resilience research and rural poverty alleviation policies have yet to fully recognize and embrace social capital as a tool to tackle poverty and vulnerability. Robust policy and academic studies on the role of indigenous welfare system with implications for social development policy making in Ethiopia are lacking. Using ethnographic techniques and simple descriptive statistics, we studied indigenous mutual support systems and how they shape the resilience trajectories of rural households against livelihood shocks within two selected PAs of Babille district of Oromia region. We found that mutual support practices are very effective in building coping resilience of households by smoothing consumption shocks. However, the traditional coping mechanisms often fail when the shock is systemic or covariate, when shocks last longer, and when a household has low level of human or finical capital.

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“…Specifically, the paper is related to some recent works on political elite capture in public welfare programmes that have studied household-level survey datasets: Besley et al (2012), Caeyers and Dercon (2012), Alatas et al (2013), and Lanjouw and Ravallion (1999). Although Besley et al (2012) have not explicitly mentioned the term 'political connections' in their study of 120 south Indian villages, they find that being a village-level elected political executive (rather than being connected to a political executive like we have studied in this paper) increases the probability of obtaining a ration card meant for the poor, while exploiting the within-village variation in access to political power and controlling for wealth, education, and asset-based eligibility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The chief councillor's (Gram Pradhan) village also obtains more public goods relative to other villages. Using a dataset of 15 rural areas covered in the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey, Caeyers and Dercon (2012), on the other hand, found that local political connections positively affected the delivery of a public food transfers programme in Ethiopia, although only clearly in the period right after the drought. They find that households with local political connections get significantly higher cash or food receipts per working day, and in total in the public food-for-work programme, than the households without such connections.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Connections and Elite Capture in a Poverty Alleviation Programme in India

Panda

2014

The Journal of Development Studies

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Political elite capture in public welfare programmes is rife in the low-income countries. Analysing a nationally-representative Indian household survey dataset, we examine the political connections hypothesis and find that a household connected to a local political executive (somebody close or as a family member) vis-à-vis not connected significantly increases the probability of its obtaining an important poverty-alleviating entitlement; that is, a below-poverty-line ration card in all three contexts: national, rural, and urban. This ubiquity of political elite capture at the local government level has guiding policy implications for the beneficiary identification process in the future.

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Political Connections and Social Networks in Targeted Transfer Programs: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

Cited by 67 publications

References 35 publications

Decentralization, market integration and efficiency-equity trade-offs: Evidence from Joint Forest Management in Ethiopian villages

Decentralization, market integration and efficiency-equity trade-offs: Evidence from Joint Forest Management in Ethiopian villages

Harnessing Social Capital for Resilience to Livelihood Shocks: Ethnographic Evidence of Indigenous Mutual Support Practices among Rural Households in Eastern Ethiopia

Political Connections and Elite Capture in a Poverty Alleviation Programme in India

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