Search

Despite the importance of public goods provisioning for poverty reduction, empirical evidence shows gross under-provision of state resources in developing countries. This results in the establishment of clientelist networks between people of unequal social status. However, clientelism is not homogenous. It varies based on the environment in which it is cultivated. Using household-level data from villages and urban slums in Pakistan, we provide a rare direct comparison of rural and urban clientelism. We find that the clientelist exchange bundle varies depending on geography and settlement structure (landholding patterns in villages and legal status in slums). While rural brokers include public goods provisioning in their exchange bundle, urban brokers have to rely on more personal services to maintain their network. Our main finding then is that rural clientelist networks are more pervasive, vary in nature, and perform more functions than their urban counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we outline the determinants of informal charitable giving and the link between giving and inequality. Arguing that inequality encompasses at least two competing effects—distrust and observed need for donations—we use a novel proxy to separate out the effect of the latter from the former on household's magnitude of informal giving. Using data from the Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy's 2014 Indigenous Individual Philanthropy Survey, we find that informal giving in Pakistan follows patterns like those observed in the literature for formal giving. We also find evidence for a positive relationship between observed need and the magnitude of person-to-person giving. Controlling for observed need, we find that the residual correlation between inequality and giving is negative, one explanation of which may be the positive link between inequality and decreased social cohesion and trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case of Pakistan, this article explores the distribution and politics of public goods provision in urban slums. Across slums, we find that public goods are mainly provided to households located in central slums rather than those in the urban periphery. Within slums, we find politicians target spending towards wealthy households but do not go through brokers, unlike the more-studied case of India. Overall, the article shows how electoral incentives in Pakistan are biased against programmatic public goods provision for the urban poor. Our results then point to variation in patronage politics among slums in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper estimates a family fixed‐effects model to test whether parental educational investments are reinforcing or compensating differences in child height and body mass index (BMI) within Oportunidades households. The results indicate that allocations are not made in response to endowment differences in isolation, but depend on the interaction of child endowment, gender, and beneficiary status. Moreover, investments are made so as to counterbalance efficiency and equity considerations: widening differences in height but closing gaps in BMI, where both strategies maximize returns given the earnings–endowment function for height and BMI in Mexico. Finally, household socio‐economic status matters. Thus, discriminatory responses within the better‐off urban beneficiary households are smaller. In contrast, indigenous beneficiary households, which have the lowest average endowment z‐scores and fraction spent on education, see the largest differences in educational outlay between child subgroups. While the economic effects seem small, these are measured relative to the mean of the base category. In some cases, then, parents are dedicating nearly a quarter of all expenditures to education for a standard deviation increase in endowment over mean sibling endowment. Hence, it seems that the success of the Oportunidades program in improving overall human capital formation may be masking rising inequalities within recipient households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]