The Impact of Media and Monotoring on Corruptin in Decentralized Public Programs: Evidence from Madagascar

Nathalie Francken, Bart Minten () and Johan Swinnen

LICOS Discussion Papers from LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven

Abstract: Local capture of public expenditures is an important problem for service delivery and poverty reduction in developing countries. Standard anticorruption institutions may not be effective, as these tend often to be corrupt themselves. This paper analyses the impact of monitoring and information distribution through the mass media on local capture of public expenditures on education in Madagascar in 2002-2003. We use survey data to assess capture in both cash and in-kind programs, at district and at school level. We find that local capture can be successfully constrained through a combination of monitoring and media programs. In addition to monitoring by the beneficiaries ("from below?, central monitoring ("from above? is important. More transparent funding mechanisms and access to mass media reduce capture. However, the impact of the media is conditional on the characteristics of the population. In communes characterized by high illiteracy, the impact of newspaper and poster campaigns is limited, and radios are more important to reduce capture.

Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-cul
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/licos/publications/dp/dp155.pdf

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:lic:licosd:15505

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LICOS Discussion Papers from LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().