Targeting, Accountability and Capture in Development Projects

Abstract

If development projects are to be effective, a minimum requirement is that the funding reaches its intended destination. Yet the history of international development is replete with examples of this not happening. I argue that there will be fewer problems with corruption or other diversions of funding—which I jointly label capture—in more precisely targeted projects. More well‐defined targeting results in superior accountability relationships because there is greater clarity of responsibility, clearer information about outcomes, and improved identifiability of stakeholders. I use an original cross‐country, cross‐project data set on the incidence of capture in World Bank‐funded investment projects to test the theory. The data show a negative relationship between targeting and capture, and I demonstrate that this relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In addition, I find that there is a higher baseline likelihood of project capture in countries perceived as more corrupt according to commonly used survey‐based measures from Transparency International and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, cross‐validating those measures and my own.

Leaving No One Behind? A New Test of Subnational Aid Targeting

“…The idea that donors largely defer to recipients when targeting aid subnationally is consistent with prior case study work showing that recipient governments can target aid according to local political factors (Briggs, ; Jablonski, ; Masaki, ). However, it clashes with research suggesting that donors exercise fairly strong control over aid (Collier, ; Morrison, ; Winters, ).…”

What Influences World Bank Project Evaluations?

“…Evaluation bias or process changes are of particular concern to researchers if these are correlated with the researchers' key explanatory variables. A few researchers have devised clever ways to check for evaluation bias related to their particular question (Dreher et al 2013) but it is 1 Outsider papers includes Buntaine and Parks (2013), Dreher et al (2013), Girod and Tobin (2011), Kilby (2015), Malik and Stone (2016), Michaelowa and Borrmann (2006), Sud and Olmstead-Rumsey (2012), and Winters (2014). Insider papers include Blum (2014), Bulman et al (2015), Chauvet et al (2010), Chauvet et al (2015), Cruz and Keefer (2013), Deininger et al (1998), Denizer et al (2013), Dollar and Levin (2005), Dollar and Svensson (2000), Geli et al (2014), Guillaumont and Laajaj (2006), Isham and Kaufmann (1999), Isham et al (1997), Kaufmann and Wang (1995), Limodio (2011), Malesa and Silarszky (2005), Moll et al (2015), Pohl et al (1992), Ralston (2014) and Smets et al (2013).…”

International organizations and development finance: Introduction to the special issue

“…For example, the Brazys et al (2017) contribution to this special issue is representative of a broader Bgeospatial turn^in aid research that leverages subnational sources of variation to better understand the motivations for and impacts of international development finance (Winters 2014;Dreher and Lohmann 2015;Nunnenkamp et al 2016a, b;Briggs 2017). With data on the precise locations and timing of specific interventions funded by bilateral and multilateral development finance institutions and subnationally geocoded outcome data, the literature is now uncovering new knowledge about the features of multilateral development finance that are truly distinctive.…”