The Political Economy of Public Sector Absence: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

Michael Callen, Saad Gulzar, Syed Ali Hasanain and Muhammad Khan

No 22340, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Public sector absenteeism undermines service delivery in many developing countries. We report results from an at-scale randomized control evaluation in Punjab, Pakistan of a reform designed to address this problem. The reform affects healthcare for 100 million citizens across 297 political constituencies. It equips government inspectors with a smartphone monitoring system and leads to a 76% increase in inspections. However, the surge in inspections does not always translate into increased doctor attendance. The scale of the experiment permits an investigation into the mechanisms underlying this result. We find that experimentally increasing the salience of doctor absence when communicating inspection reports to senior policymakers improves subsequent doctor attendance. Next, we find that both the reform and the communication of information to senior officials are more impactful in politically competitive constituencies. Our results suggest that interactions between politicians and bureaucrats might play a critical role in shaping the success or failure of reforms.

JEL-codes: D02 D72 D73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-pol
Note: DEV POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22340.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Political Economy of Public Sector Absence: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:22340

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22340

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().