Military dictatorship and the provision of public goods

T M Tonmoy Islam and Shabana Mitra

Oxford Development Studies, 2023, vol. 51, issue 3, 307-321

Abstract: Non-democracies, particularly dictatorships, provide local public goods differently when compared to democracies. We use the Partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 to examine how similar ethnic groups living in similar agro-climatic conditions obtain substantially different configurations of public goods when exposed to different governance regimes. Our methodology draws upon the shifts in the central regime in Pakistan, between popularly elected governments and military dictatorships while using India as a benchmark, which had democratic governments throughout. We create and utilize a novel dataset for our district-level analyses from various census rounds in India and Pakistan. Our regression results consistently show that there is a significant under-provision of various public goods under dictatorships, while controlling for a host of time-varying local factors. Our results survive a battery of robustness checks and are particularly, not driven by large cities, or specific provinces.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2023.2218640

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