Development projects like schools and latrines are popular with politicians and voters alike, yet many abandoned mid-construction.
• Using a new database of over 14k Ghana small development projects: one-third never completed, consuming nearly one-fifth local government investment.
• Explaining project noncompletion through a theory of dynamically inconsistent collective choices facing commitment problems.
• Finding evidence consistent with this theory but not corruption or clientelism explanations.
These findings suggest fiscal institutions can increase completion rates by mitigating these political failures.
| The Political Economy of Unfinished Development Projects: Corruption, Clientelism, or Collective Choice? was authored by Martin J. Williams. It was published by Cambridge in APSR in 2017. |
