En économie du développement, la culture d’évaluation s’est renforcée pour mieux orienter l’aide vers les actions qui ont démontré la preuve de leur efficacité. Dans ce contexte aux pratiques renouvelées, un essor des méthodes expérimentales s’est fait jour dans le domaine de l’évaluation, notamment à travers la méthode des évaluations aléatoires qui est fortement promue par le laboratoire J-PAL, et notamment par Esther Duflo. Contribuant empiriquement à la constitution d’un « fonds scientifique capitalisable » grâce aux connaissances mises à jour, mais comportant des failles persistantes, nous procédons dans cette thèse à une analyse critique de la méthode, avec l’appui d’une récente littérature économique française et anglophone.De plus, nous avons mené une enquête par questionnaire auprès de parents d’élèves du primaire à Madagascar, notre terrain d’étude. Pour la réaliser, nous nous sommes basés sur une évaluation aléatoire qui avait été menée dans ce pays par une doctorante affiliée au J-PAL, et qui concluait à un impact positif d’un traitement à base d’information statistique sur les rendements de l’éducation, délivrée aux parents d’élèves du primaire. En reproduisant ce traitement dans notre enquête, nous avons voulu savoir si l’on pouvait aboutir à des résultats similaires bien que la méthode employée varie. Nous retrouvons globalement les conclusions de l’auteure de l’évaluation aléatoire, bien que nous utilisions une méthode moins purement quantitative. / In development economics, the culture of evaluation is being strengthened to specify which development actions could be effective, and thus allows a better targeting of aid on the actions that have proven their effectiveness. Within this context of renewed practices, an expansion of experimental methods in the evaluation field has emerged, in particular through the method of randomized evaluations strongly promoted by the J-PAL laboratory, particularly by the emblematic figure of Esther Duflo. Contributing empirically to the composition of a « scientific capitalizable fund » thanks to the updated knowledge, but still including persistent limits, we set into this thesis about a critical analysis of this method, with the mobilization of some recent French and English economic literature.Moreover, we conducted a questionnaire survey to primary school pupils’ parents in Madagascar, our field study. To carry out it, we used a randomized evaluation that had been conducted in this country by a PhD student affiliated with the J-PAL and whose finding was the positive effect of some statistical information treatment on returns to education towards primary school pupils’ parents. By reproducing this treatment in our study, we wanted to know whether it was possible to achieve similar results even though the applied method varies. It’s globally matching up with the conclusions of the author of the randomized evaluation, even if we use a less purely quantitative method.

The transfer of technology to developing countries constitutes one of the major debates in the literature on development economics. The present empirical investigation is intended to " contribute to the large existing literature on technological transfer. Its major contribution lies in demonstrating rigorously that the integration of foreign technologies is greatly affected by the socio-economic conditions of the recipient countries. The present study attempts to identify the main socioeconomic characteristics involved in assimilating transferred technlogy. It first provides a quantifiable measure of the rate of technological absorption. Then, in presenting the selection of indicators, the general procedures followed in choosing the sample of countries are summarized and the principles guiding the choice of variables are examined. The model is based on multiple regression analysis, which is discussed in some detail. Another statistical method is used to explore the interdependence of the economic and social indicators, which provides more exact knowledge about their various interactions and lays the groundwork for the problem at hand. Three main indicators are identified that explain a significant-. sixty one percent of the total variance of the dependent variable. These main indicators are the rate of education, trade policies and the availability of certain consumer products. It is found that these variables express different and important dimensions of the third world economy. In general, the results reveal that the rate of technology integration varies greatly with the level of socio economic development. The findings of the investigation are analysed using new and efficient methods of diagnostic techniques, and are also seen within their theoretical perspectives'. The analysis of results is concluded with a discussion of intangible factors that cannot as yet be quantified; factors such as political and managerial quality and yet can be expected to have significant effects on the rate of technological integration. / Ministry of Hydraulics in Algeria

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No abstract / Development Studies / M.A. (Development Studies)

The use of group lending for poverty alleviation is a widespread feature of modern microfinance. The structure of joint-liability credit - if one member defaults the others are held financially responsible - produces a natural tension between a borrower's social and economic interests. This study integrates theory from economics, sociology, and behavioural experiments to address the question, "How do social and economic mechanisms interact to shape a microcredit group's financial behaviour?" The empirical analysis involves an original dataset from a microfinance institution in Sierra Leone. The total dataset includes 7,025 joint-liability borrowers involved in 47,931 repayment transactions from 2005 to 2011. The empirical methods used are diverse: ethnographic fieldwork, GPS spatial analysis, social affiliation survey design, and multilevel statistical analysis of loan performance data. The original work is structured as three distinct papers. In the first paper, I examine social collateral, the formal use of a borrower's relationships as security against loan default. How does a group's spatial structure affect the efficacy of social collateral? Spatial concentration improves a group's economic performance up to a certain level after which the effect reverses and performance declines. The relationship is driven by a social trade-off between ability and willingness to enforce the loan. Further, groups that consist of multiple spatial fragments produce worse performance. Spatially fragmented groups are prone to splitting into social factions. In the second paper, I question what drives the self-selection process of microcredit group formation. The results show that group leaders prefer members with pre-existing social ties, who are spatially proximate, and have matching business types. The preference for socio-spatial factors is likely motivated by reducing the risk of strategic default by group members. In the third paper, I explore how economic cooperation in small groups evolves over years of repeated interaction. Despite the selective retention of better performing groups, average cooperation rates consistently decline, in terms of contribution and effort. Further, variance across groups continues to increase over 30 months of repeated interaction, suggesting that convergence to a stable cooperation rate has not occurred. Given that group lending exhibits many of the factors found to promote cooperation in laboratory experiments, it is surprising to find such a marked decline in this field setting. Overall, this thesis contributes to economic sociology by dissecting the difficult trade-offs between social and economic motives in group lending and offers policy implications for microfinance institutions regarding group formation heuristics, contract design, and loan management.

This thesis considers how fiscal and monetary policy should be conducted in resourcerich economies. It consists of three papers addressing: whether governments should spend, save or invest volatile oil income; the assets they should save in; and how monetary policy should respond. The first, “Eight principles for managing resource wealth”, shows that capital-scarce countries should save relatively less against oil price volatility, and invest more in domestic capital. They also should prepare for volatility in advance, and treat savings as a source of income rather than a temporary buffer. To show this the paper develops a framework that nests a variety of existing results, which are presented in eight principles. The second, “The Elephant in the Ground: Oil extraction and asset allocation in sovereign wealth funds”, shows that governments should use sovereign wealth funds to offset oil price risk, extract oil faster if its price is pro-cyclical, and use precautionary savings to manage any residual volatility. To do this it combines three strands of literature for the first time: on continuous-time portfolio theory, oil extraction and precautionary savings. The third, “Optimal monetary responses to oil discoveries”, addresses the anticipation effects around an oil discovery. It shows that the terms of trade will need to appreciate twice: once when oil is discovered and consumers anticipate future revenues; and again when the government begins spending the revenues. Oil wealth will give the monetary authority an incentive to appreciate the terms of trade, in addition to stabilising domestic inflation and the output gap. Optimal policy is well-approximated by a standard monetary rule that also responds to expected changes in the natural level of output.

Stable networks of cooperation, through which persons act under assumptions of reciprocity, promise-keeping and trust, are necessary for any society to flourish. These relationships have been described as “social capital”, defined as the norms and networks that enable collective action. Whilst study of social capital has generated much attention from those interested in its consequences for economic development and social unity, there remains a certain gap within the social sciences between homo economicus assumptions of self-motivated behaviour and manifestations of social capital. This invites analysis into the causes of social capital, which is the question taken up in this thesis. Asking what necessary conditions facilitate social capital’s emergence, this study analyses trustful relationships in urban Kenya and Tanzania. Urban living acts as a litmus test to trust relations and helps expose the necessary forces for social capital’s creation. Alongside this, the research sites of Kenya and Tanzania assisted in controlling for historical and cultural factors that may blur causal accounts of social capital. The two countries share similarities in their political, social and economic histories and, at the same time, exhibit diverging political emphases since independence and resulting levels of citizen-on-citizen trust. The country-level similarities and differences thus help contrast the lower levels of urban trust found in Kenya against the higher levels found in Tanzania, allowing in-depth examination of the conditions that support social capital’s emergence. Evidence is offered firstly through qualitative exploration of the formation of trustful relationships in economically competitive scenarios. Study of a single social network of plastic-bag sellers in Mwanza, Tanzania, reveals the importance of early anchors of trust as zones of reputation-indication. The comparative experiences of local market-sellers in Kisumu, Kenya, and Mwanza, Tanzania, support understanding higher levels of trust to pervade in Tanzania than in Kenya, and evaluate the influence of ethnic homogeneity for community solidarity. Interviews with business owners of Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, proceed to offer insights on alternative, normative dimensions that may help explain different levels of trust found amongst citizens. To measure the quantitative extent of trust and particular factors influential for its formation, “trust games” were deployed in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The experiments were engineered to test areas of common knowledge, specifically ethnicity and the “social virtue” of integrity. Engaging with common knowledge variables in this way offered for analysis areas of mutual understanding between citizens. Alongside confirming higher levels of trust in Tanzania than in Kenya, the games revealed how common knowledge of ethnicity and integrity bore influential effects on levels of trust that were country-specific. Whilst common knowledge of ethnicity tended to have a negative impact on levels of cooperation in Tanzania as compared to Kenya, the effect was the opposite for the social virtue of integrity. The thesis’ central argument is that congruence between citizens on what marks out a trustworthy person is a precondition for relationships of trust to emerge; some symmetry in the moral discourse surrounding agency, character and reputation is thus critical for bringing about the economic and political benefits associated with social capital.

This thesis consists of four separate chapters which address different aspects of inequality and income determination. The first three chapters are country-level studies which examine (1) how incomes are shaped by spatial price differences, (2) the factor income composition, and (3) enterprise size. The final chapter analyses how income inequality changed at the global level. The first chapter investigates the implications of regional price differences for earnings differentials and inequality in Germany. I combine a district-level price index with administrative earnings data from social security records. Prices have a strong equalising effect on district average wages in West Germany, but a weaker effect in East Germany and at the national level. The change in overall inequality as a result of regional price differences is small (although significant in many cases), because inequality is mostly explained by differences within rather than between districts. The second chapter is motivated by the rapid increase in top income shares in the United States since the 1980s. Using data derived from tax filings, I show that this pattern is very similar after controlling for changes in tax unit size. Over the same period as top income shares increased, the composition of these incomes changed dramatically, with the labour share rising. Using a non-parametric copula framework, I show that incomes from labour and capital have become more closely associated at the top. This association is asymmetric such that top wage earners are more likely to also receive high capital incomes, compared with top capital income recipients receiving high wages. In the third chapter, I investigate the positive cross-sectional relationship between enterprise size and earnings using panel data from Ghana. I find evidence for a significant firm size effect in matched firm-worker data and a labour force panel, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. The size effect in self-employment is stronger in the cross-section, but it is driven by individual time-invariant characteristics. The final chapter studies the global interpersonal income distribution using a newly constructed and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. The chapter finds that the global Gini remains high and approximately unchanged at around 0.7. However, this hides a substantial change in the global distribution from a twin-peaked distribution in 1988 into a single-peaked one now. Furthermore, the regional composition of the global distribution changed, as China graduated from the bottom ranks. As a result of the growth in Asia, the poorest quantiles of the global distribution are now largely from Sub-Saharan Africa. By exploiting the panel dimension of the dataset, the analysis shows which decile-groups within countries have benefitted most over this 20-year period. In addition, the chapter presents a preliminary assessment of how estimates of global inequality are affected by the likely underreporting of top incomes in surveys.

Non-economic factors like culture and politics, as well as the socio-economic background, matter significantly in directing economic development endeavours towards social wellbeing. Therefore, the current narrow definition of economic development must be extended to include overall wellbeing. As one of the primary forms of physical capital constituting a regional economy, transport investments have played a significant role in development plans. Given that accessibility to social infrastructure is a basic need, certain levels of infrastructure are essential. How these investments have an impact on different groups of individuals has kept many scholars busy for a long time. However, the economic spillover effects of these investments into female labour markets have remained largely unexplored. Situating the implications of development initiatives, including transport investments, for female labour markets in social and cultural contexts requires an integrated view of the regional economy. Although economic geography and existing development theories provide extensive conceptual models to elucidate the links between transport, labour markets and culture, the methodological implications are obscure; hence, the empirical evidence remains weak. This thesis explores the economic and non-economic dynamics of regional economies to clarify the links between transport infrastructure, labour markets, and social and cultural conditions. In particular, the association between female labour forces and development efforts, in the form of transport infrastructure development, is conceptually and empirically examined. This thesis conducts a case study on Turkey. With the extensive infrastructure investment that has been made since 2002 and the extremely low rates of female labour force participation (around 25%), compared to EU-15 and OECD averages of around 65%, Turkey serves as an illuminating case. Theoretically, the study shows that the focus of transport economics on the economic growth effect of investments is not consistent with current efforts to extend economic development objectives: transport research requires a broader view to assess its development implications. The study demonstrates how the interactions between the economic, physical, political, cultural and socio-economic attributes of regions significantly affect how individuals benefit from the investments. The overarching policy implications of the study are useful for regional development policy with a gender focus: complementary policy interventions in human capital development and the consideration of social and cultural attitudes should strengthen the positive impacts of physical investments on female labour markets.

The quality of governance and institutions is increasingly seen as a fundamental factor in shaping the development prospects of poor countries. As a consequence, donor agencies have increasingly allocated resources to providing technical assistance for improving governance standards in such countries, with mixed results. This thesis investigates the domestic and external factors affecting the outcomes of reforms aimed at improving the quality of government budget institutions across a sample of 16 aid-dependent countries. It provides a new definition of the quality of budget institutions, and develops an analytical framework that identifies the key factors at play in the political economy of budget reforms. The analysis starts with a medium-N ‘pattern finding’ approach, based on a new dataset tracking changes in the quality of budget institutions over the period 2001 to 2007. This is followed by a small-N ‘process tracing’ approach, with in-depth case studies of Mozambique and Burkina Faso (with additional evidence from Tanzania), looking at both overall reform trajectories and four specific budget reform areas. The results show that among domestic factors, economic and political stability are preconditions for successful budget reforms. A minimum degree of government leadership and commitment to reforms is also a very important factor shaping budget reform outcomes, alongside the centralisation of budget institutions. Surprisingly, among external factors, the level of technical assistance and the use of so-called programme aid modalities were less important than the overall fragmentation of aid flows and the ways in which technical assistance is delivered in influencing budget reform outcomes. Donors’ hopes of ‘buying’ better budget governance, therefore, are more likely to be enhanced not by additional resources, but by better behaviour. Moreover, such strategy is likely to work only in countries with enough capacity and interest in reforms.