EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

State-building on the Margin: An Urban Experiment in Medellín

Christopher Blattman, Gustavo Duncan, Benjamin Lessing and Santiago Tobon ()
Additional contact information
Christopher Blattman: University of Chicago

No 3bncz, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Medellin’s government wanted to raise its efficacy, legitimacy, and control. The city identified 80 neighborhoods with weak state presence and competing armed actors. In half, they increased non-police street presence tenfold for two years, offering social services and dispute resolution. In places where the state was initially weakest, the intervention did not work, mainly because the government struggled to deliver on its promises. Where the state began stronger, the government raised opinions of its services and legitimacy. If there are indeed low marginal returns to investing in capacity in the least-governed areas, this could produce increasing returns to state-building.

Date: 2022-01-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/61e6eda195a030067ced4529/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:3bncz

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/3bncz

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:3bncz