Democracy, Public Expenditures, and the Poor: Understanding Political Incentives for Providing Public Services

By Philip E. Keefer, Stuti Khemani. 2005

449 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods and reduce poverty vary across countries. Even in democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents and private transfers that benefit a few citizens at the expense of many. These distortions can be traced to imperfections in political markets that are greater in some countries than in others. This article reviews the theory and evidence on the impact on political incentives of incomplete information for voters, the lack of credibility of political promises, and social polarization. The analysis has implications for policy and for reforms to improve public goods provision and reduce poverty.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9bc99f13a4ec476452ee69e72bf9542273f8ce3

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Citations in the corpus

Can Informed Public Deliberation Overcome Clientelism? Experimental Evidence from Benin (2013, background): “See Keefer and Khemani [2003] for a discussion of the role of broad public goods in reducing poverty.”
Extending the concept of the resource curse: natural resources and public spending on health (2014, background): “Keefer and Khemani (2005) state that the level of democratization matters especially for public service delivery to the poor, including health.”
Earthquake propensity and the politics of mortality prevention (2010, unknown): “However, the effects of competitive elections on political incentives diminish in the presence of “political market imperfections” (Keefer and Khemani 2005) that undercut the ability of voters to hold incumbents accountable.”
Distributive Politics Around the World (2013, background): “An important motivation for this line of work comes from the chronic political distortions and compromised accountability so often observed in service delivery in low-income countries (Keefer & Khemani 2005).”
Is Transparency the Key to Reducing Corruption in Resource-Rich Countries? (2009, background): “See Keefer and Khemani (2005). See also Strömberg (2001) for a”
Media and Politics (2015, background): “…of U.S. congressmen, Arnold (2004) finds that newspapers with at least one competing daily paper published fewer articles about its local representative than did a monopoly newspaper, controlling for newspaper circulation and the number of representatives in a newspaper’s core circulation area.”