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Field
Abstract
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Before
Countries with high levels of corruption also have slower government service delivery but it is not known if corruption causes delays, delays causes corruption or if the two are causally related at all. In this project I propose a model for how bureaucrats choose processing times and bribe demands to government service applicants. The models shows how, under certain information settings, the possibility of demanding bribes creates incentives for bureaucrats to create inefficiently long processing times for some applications.
I will test the predictions of this model using an experiment in the context of a particular government service in a particular setting, namely changes to land records in Bangladesh. The experiment will first test a management information system in the form of a monthly performance scorecard, making it visible to bureaucrats’ managers if there are delays in the processing of applications for land record changes. The first question the experiment will answer is if the scorecard actually reduce delays in this government service. The second question is if the scorecard, having created an incentive to reduce the number of delayed applications, also reduces the amount of bribes paid by applicants. My model generates different predictions for how the bribe payments change under different information settings. Hence the experiment will not only test the model but also test the information setting under which bureaucrats operate.
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After
Slow government service delivery and low accountability among government bureaucrats are common problems in many low- and middle-income countries. As eGovernance systems are becoming common practice in government service delivery in Bangladesh, more and more data is generated regarding about how bureaucrats are providing government services but so far very little of data is used by the government to improve service delivery. In this project we will use the data generated by one eGovernance system to generate a monthly Performance Scorecard for government bureaucrats in terms of the timeliness of their service provision. The service for which we will implement this intervention is land record changes, also know as “mutations”. We will be sending out performance scorecards displaying how many applications for mutations were processed within the government mandated time limit of 45 working days as well as how many applications that are still pending beyond this limit. By sending these performance scorecards to both the bureaucrats doing the land record changes, as well as the superiors of these bureaucrats we hope to improve accountability within the bureaucracy and thereby increasing the number of government services provided within the time limit.
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