Taming the Beast: Harnessing Blockchains in Developing Country Governments

Abstract

Amid pressing demands to achieve critical sustainable development goals, governments in developing countries face the additional complex task of embracing new digital technologies such as blockchains. This paper develops a framework interlinking development, technology, and government institutions that policymakers and development practitioners could use to address such a conundrum. State capacity and democratic governance are introduced as drivers in the overall analysis. With this in hand, blockchain technology is revisited from the perspective of governments in the Global South, identifying in the process key traits and proposing a new typology. An overview of the status of blockchain deployments in the Global South follows, complemented by a closer look at country examples to distill trends, patterns and risks. The paper closes with a discussion of the findings, highlighting both challenges and opportunities for governments. It also provides basic guidance to development practitioners interested in enhancing current programming using blockchains as an enabler.

If Technology Has Arrived Everywhere, Why Has Income Diverged?

“…In the baseline calculations, the restriction that our model has a balanced growth path implies that the income elasticity of technology demand is equal to one. In Section IVC, we show that our findings are robust to allowing for non-homotheticities in the demand for technology 4. As discussed in Section IIA, we can do this by taking advantage of the three dimensional nature of our data.…”

“…The productivity of a technology-vintage pair, Z(τ, v τ ), is common across countries and is given by (4) Z(τ, v τ ) = e (σ+γ)τ +γ ( v τ −τ) = e στ+γ v τ , where (σ + γ) τ is the productivity level associated with the first vintage of technology τ , and γ( v τ − τ) captures the productivity gains associated with the subsequent introduction of new vintages v τ ≥ τ . By allowing subsequent vintages of the same technology to be more productive, we want to capture the idea that productivity not only increases through the introduction of new technologies, but also that technologies become more productive over time (e.g., Aghion and Howitt 1992;Klette and Kortum 2004).…”

“…Our estimation strategy takes care of the effect of income on the demand for technology, 3 and of the effect on production costs of economy-wide factors that have a symmetric effect across technologies. 4 The average estimated adoption lag is 42 years. The average intensity of adoption in non-Western countries is half (47 percent) of the level of Western countries.…”

Data Integrity Time Optimization of a Blockchain IoT Smart Home Network Using Different Consensus and Hash Algorithms

“…There are various types of smart contracts that are used in blockchain systems. The following are the fundamental types of smart contracts [48]:…”

Perspectives on “Good” in Blockchain for Good

“…"Blockchain for Good" describes the journal section in Frontiers in Blockchain with an explicit moral, ethical, and responsible intent. To date too few authors have examined what "good" and "value" actually mean in relation to the technology application, and for whom value is created and why (see for example Kim and Zetlin-Jones, 2019;Manski and Bauwens, 2020;Zambrano, 2020). Most assume that the application is inherently good either because of their area of study, e.g., aid flows, human rights, etc., or simply because the application is in a nonfinancial area.…”