This is a dissertation about the organisational structure of the World Bank, the professional practice of evaluation, and the meaning of the concept of aid effectiveness in practice. In international development, evaluation is a professional activity that determines and then reports on the impacts of aid projects and programmes to the clients of such efforts and to the public. 'Aid effectiveness' is a concept that refers to a standard of how aid projects and organisations should operate and the results, such as economic growth and poverty alleviation, which these efforts should deliver in order to work. The concept of 'aid effectiveness' has also been used in the debate about international development as a system and its reform. Given that aid policymakers and academic researchers often use the data contained in development organisations evaluations to determine the extent to which aid projects and programmes are 'effective', it is critical to analyse what these evaluations measure and what influences their ratings and judgments. Based on a case study of the World Bank, the analysis is primarily qualitative and draws on both interviews with evaluation professionals in the World Bank and content analyses of the logical framework, indicators, and language in the World Bank's evaluations at the project- and country-level. Building on the previous theoretical work in post-structuralism that considers how international development organisations 'produce' their work through certain terms and processes (Escobar, 1995; Crush, 1995), I assess how the professional practice of evaluation in the Bank 'produces' the results of aid at the project- and country-level, specifically in the evaluation reports that it makes publically available. The World Banks data and evaluation reports are a window through which to understand the impact of aid, and several factors that influence this 'window' are assessed, including the institutional role of evaluation, the professional practice of evaluation, and the required evaluation processes within the World Bank. The study has important implications for practitioners of international development, academic researchers, and evaluation professionals who endeavour to improve the aid system and often rely on the results of the World Bank's evaluations to inform their understanding of the impact of particular development efforts. By reshaping the discussion from one which considers if aid 'works' to one about the data and the process of making a judgment about the success of aid projects and programmes, I articulate what the role of evaluation is in practice and what the World Bank's resulting evaluative data do and do not reflect about the World Bank's work. The relationship between the 'scales' of aid is also analysed by comparing and contrasting the evaluation processes at the project-level and the country-level. I challenge the notion of a 'micro-macro paradox' (Mosley, 1986) between the successful results of the World Banks projects and the economic development in its client countries by articulating the actual meaning of this data in context, the unseen institutional forces that shape this data, and the difficulty of asserting a linear relationship between the results of projects and programmes on different scales of aid.

The efficient operation and expansion of utilities in developing countries is crucial for growth and poverty reduction. However, recent reforms aimed at improving the performance of these sectors through privatization and the introduction of new regulatory regimes have had limited success. This thesis aims to consider the most pertinent problems for utility regulation in developing countries and how policy may need to be adapted appropriately. The thesis begins by surveying the most recent empirical and theoretical work on the area. I argue that four key institutional limitations commonly found in developing countries must be considered when designing regulatory policy: Limited capacity, limited accountability, limited commitment and limited fiscal efficiency. The remainder of the thesis then focuses on two of these weaknesses – limited commitment and limited accountability – to develop further insights into how regulatory policy may be most suitably adapted. In considering the effect of limited commitment, I pursue a theoretical approach. I first focus on the relationship between the government and the utility operator when the government cannot commit to a time-inconsistent policy of not expropriating investment. After building a model where reputation is used to sustain investment in equilibrium, I consider the model’s implications for policy. The thesis then builds a different model to consider the impact of governments’ inability to commit when trading electricity internationally. I focus on the resulting hold-up problem and the impact this has on investment levels within trading countries. The effect of limited accountability is then investigated empirically through the analysis of data on electricity firms and regulators in Latin America. In particular, I consider how firms’ performance is affected by corruption, ownership and regulatory governance, looking in detail at interactions between these variables and attempting to break down regulatory governance into its various components.

This thesis presents three core chapters examining different aspects of the relationship between natural resources and economic development. While addressing different questions they share several features in common: a concern with causal inference; overcoming the challenges of endogeneity between resource abundance and other characteristics of developing countries; and the use of new and novel datasets with spatially identified units of analysis. The work contributes to a rich and growing empirical literature seeking to deepen our understanding of the underlying mechanisms affecting the fortunes of resource-abundant countries. In the introductory chapter I discuss the extensive literature on this topic and in particular focus on the new generation of well-identified within-country studies, seeking to understand the empirical relationship between resources and economic development. Countries typically welcome the news of a resource discovery with joy and indeed, resource discoveries hold great economic potential. But what determines whether a country is resource rich or not? Is it more than just a chance finding, or good geology? In Chapter 2, entitled Institutions and the Location of Oil Exploration I present an investigation into this question. I examine the relationship between governance and choices of where to drill for oil. This work utilises a new dataset on exploration wells and looks at the distribution of drilling close to national borders. This allows me to identify estimates for the effect of differences in governance between neighbours. Two times out of three, investors choose to drill on the side of borders that are better governed, all other things being equal. This suggests that resource-wealth itself may be contingent on factors beyond geology, and indeed may be endogenous to the process of development. In Chapter 3, entitled The Local Effects of Resource Extraction, I turn my attention to the local economic consequences of industrial mining in Indonesia. I present a simple three-sector general equilibrium model to generate predictions for the local labour market, akin to the Corden-Neary Dutch disease model of the macroeconomy. I test the predicted effects in response to an exogenous resource sector shock by looking at mine opening or mine expansion events across three hundred mines. I test the predictions of the model, first by estimating the economic footprint from industrial mining; found to be an average of fifteen kilometre radius. I then examine the response of reported labour market activity from households surveyed in nearby communities. Here I find no evidence for a shift of local labour into the mining sector. I do find however a notable movement of labour from the traded sectors (agriculture and manufacturing) to the non-traded service sector, with a strong effect for foreign-owned mines versus domestic ones. Chapter 4, entitled Disentangling the Effects of Resource Extraction: Local Government and Investment Multipliers, examines the oil and gas boom in Indonesia from 1999-2009. Here I deploy a variety of identification strategies to attempt to disentangle the regional effects of the boom, measured in terms of district GDP. I estimate effects arising from transfers of revenue to local government. Using an instrumental variable approach I isolate the fiscal channel from resource projects. I find a positive and significant effect of increased local government revenues on district GDP over the boom decade. I then examine the spillovers from resource projects, isolating them from fiscal transfers. For districts neighbouring resource rich districts I find evidence for a modest positive effect arising from project investments, rather than fiscal transfers. In Chapter 5 I present concluding thoughts and discuss a future research agenda. I also summarise the burgeoning landscape of resource data available for within country and spatially identified studies and offer some thoughts on how this might evolve.

Despite the breakthrough of ‘women’s empowerment’ in the international development field and the continuous emphasis on its importance, there is still no consensus on the concept’s meaning. Many feminist scholars argue that this has affected the concept’s transformative potential as development institutions have tended to adopt overly simplistic understandings. The recent establishment of UN Women can be understood as marking an institutionalization of the women’s empowerment agenda as it was created through development institutions’ joint forces for the increased advancement of gender agendas. With this new institution and the still ambiguous meaning of women’s empowerment, this study examines how UN Women understands women’s empowerment and explores possible implications of this understanding for its practice of empowering women. Via ideal types this study uses feminist critique and visions as reference points to discuss whether UN Women has managed to change previous simplistic understanding of women’s empowerment. The study concludes that UN Women’s understanding of women’s empowerment is similar to the international development institutions’ often adopted understanding of the concept. The results therefore imply that despite the institutionalization of the women’s empowerment agenda via the creation of UN Women, the transformative project of women’s empowerment is likely to be absent.

This diploma thesis points to the barriers which impede backward African countries in economic development. It sees an imperfect institutional environment of the poor countries as a major issue. It outlines the problems on specific cases of Rwanda, Botswana and Kenya and it also suggests possible solutions for overcoming persisting poverty. The first chapter focuses on explanation of development theories and effectiveness of foreign aid. The next chapter regards economic development from the institutional point of view. Moreover, it presents the theoretical concept of property rights as the main factor of economic prosperity. The last theoretical chapter describes a role of government and its effect and effect of interest groups on the economy of particular country. The economic policy development of concrete African countries is discribed in analytical part of the thesis. In conclusion of the work the particular findings are summed up and furthemore, the certain solutions which should help to overcome big poverty in poor African countries are offered.

This diploma thesis deals with the postconflict reconstruction in Afghanistan from the american invasion in 2001 with the special focus on institutional reforms which were implemented there and whether these reforms caught on and function properly. Firstly, I deal with the conclusions which the theoretics of institutional economics came to regarding the role of institutions in economic development, how economic and political institutions come to existence and develop and if it is possible to change country's instituional environment. The institutions which lead to economic growth are above all equality before law, equality of opportunities, rule of law and free bussiness and trade. However, not all countries developed this optimal instituional framework because of different economic and political history. These countries then suffer from poverty and instability and in many of these cases the international community intervene to change this unfavourable situation. However, as many these unsuccessful interventions show, to change the country's institutional environment is not easy. Spontaneously or from below developed institutions are deeply rooted in society and if they are not in accordance with new institutional reforms, they will probably not function properly or will even lead to opposite results. In the case of Afghanistan, many years of civil war resulted in creation of war economy and total fall of state institutions while this power vacuum wal filled by rise of local warlords who, with the help of armed militias, seized control over number of regions and made a living by illegal trade. The reform process started after the successful military invasion in 2001 and after the fall of Taliban regime with the goal to establish liberal democracy of western type in Afghanistan was not successful. Most of the country is again under the control of Taliban, economy consists mostly of opium growing and illegal trade and the country is still extremely poor and instable and in spite of the change of formal rules actually nothing has changed- Afghanistan is still war economy and fallen state.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:34:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vanessa Cordeiro de Carvalho.pdf: 1494048 bytes, checksum: 34b8dc0406cc7a5dfb5ec338e3ba6bb6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-02-08 / This dissertation tries to describe and analyze the forms of state intervention on the economic domain, with emphasis on the mode of induction, through the activity of the BNDES state development, to implement services for public sanitation. It starts with the initial analysis on the implementation of the Economic Constitution based in the 1988 Constitution, in order to show the scope of the current model of intervention geared to economic development through public policy, compared with that of previous periods interventional procedures aimed at some specific oligarchic groups. Then the legal aspects of the activity of the state fomentation were appreciated, including state intervention in the financial system, by regulating and involvement with the creation of BNDES, a development finance institution. Later the issue of sanitation is treated in a specific way, with a historical examination of the action and the relevance it has on the social, health and environmental aspects, especially with the enactment of Law nº11.445/2007, evaluating the BNDES activities specifically aimed the sector, including the analysis of the portion of the segment with solid waste, under the light of Law nº 12.305/2010, which brings the national policy on solid waste with express provision of administrative activity promotion. / A presente dissertação intenta descrever e analisar as formas de intervenção do Estado sobre o domínio econômico, com destaque para a modalidade de indução, através da atividade de fomento estatal do BNDES, para os serviços públicos de saneamento básico. Partiu-se da análise inicial relativa à realização da Constituição Econômica na Constituição de 1988, a fim de evidenciar o alcance do modelo atual de intervenção voltado ao desenvolvimento econômico através da efetivação das políticas públicas que em comparação com as regras interventivas de períodos anteriores, destinadas a alguns grupos oligárquicos específicos, demonstram a evolução do tema. Em seguida apreciou-se detidamente os aspectos jurídicos da atividade de fomento do Estado, incluindo a intervenção estatal no sistema financeiro por regulação e por participação, com a criação de uma instituição financeira de desenvolvimento, o BNDES. Posteriormente o tema de saneamento básico foi tratado de modo específico com um exame histórico do segmento e da relevância que tem no aspecto social, sanitário e ambiental, avaliando-se as atividades do BNDES voltadas especificamente ao setor, incluindo-se análise à parte sobre o tema de resíduos sólidos à luz da lei nº12.305/2010, que traz a Política Nacional de Resíduos Sólidos com previsão expressa para a atividade administrativa de fomento.