Publications by Author: Kapur, Devesh

2007
Herrera, Yoshiko Margaret, and Devesh Kapur. 2007. “Improving Data Quality: Actors, Incentives and Capabilities”. Abstract

This paper examines the construction and use of datasets in political science. We focus on three interrelated questions: How might we assess data quality? What factors shape data quality? And how can these factors be addressed to improve data quality? We first outline some problems with existing dataset quality, including issues of validity, coverage and accuracy; and we discuss some ways of identifying problems as well as some consequences of data quality problems. The core of the paper addresses the second question by analyzing the incentives and capabilities facing four key actors in a data supply–chain: respondents; states (including bureaucracies and politicians); international organizations; and finally, academic scholars. We conclude by making some suggestions for improving the use and construction of datasets. We present evidence from a variety of contexts but especially from Africa, China, India and Russia.

1077_yh_improvingdata.pdf
2005

Might poor countries gain when their best and brightest leave?

In the 2002 football World Cup, France, the reigning world champions, suffered a humiliating defeat to unfancied Senegal. All 11 members of the victorious Senegalese team had played for European clubs. They were not alone. By 2000, the first and second divisions of Europe's leagues had poached enough African players to field 70 teams. So, have greedy European clubs deprived Senegal of its best footballers, or has the prospect of a lucrative career in Europe encouraged more Senegalese to take up the beautiful game?

This question is posed by a new book, Give Us Your Best and Brightest, by Devesh Kapur and John McHale. The authors are development economists first, football fans second (if at all). But they see the emigration of African players as a highly visible example of the “brain drain”. Less visible, but more worrying, is the departure of the poor world's doctors, nurses and teachers to more lucrative job markets in the rich world. Ghana, for example, has only 6.2 doctors per 100,000 people. Perhaps three-quarters of its doctors leave within ten years of qualifying.

The answer to the Senegal conundrum is of course "both": the best players leave, and the dream of emulating them motivates many others to take their place. The real question is whether the second effect outweighs the first, leaving the game in Senegal stronger or weaker than it otherwise would be. A few economists, including Andrew Mountford, of Royal Holloway (part of the University of London), and Oded Stark, of the University of Bonn, think the net effect of the brain drain is similarly ambiguous. The prospect of securing a visa to America or Australia should tempt more people in poor countries to invest in education. Mr Stark calls this a "brain gain". If the temptation is strong enough, and the chances of landing a visa low enough, the poor country could even come out ahead: it might gain more qualified (if disappointed) doctors and engineers than it loses.

As with all debates about the brain drain, theory has run ahead of evidence. The numbers on international flows of people are much patchier than those on cross-border flows of goods or capital. In a recent paper, Mr Stark and his co-authors investigate internal migration instead. The rural villages of Mexico lose many of their brightest sons and daughters to jobs in cities or border towns. Those Mexicans who leave their home villages tend to be better educated than those who stay. But despite this, the example the leavers set (and the job leads they provide) raises the average level of schooling of those left behind. Because they can aspire to a world beyond the village, even if they never reach it, young Mexicans have an added reason to stay in school beyond a ninth year, the authors show.

Branches picked bare

Even if the brain drain does leave a country with a better-educated populace, is this necessarily a good thing? Education is not free, and some of those who gambled on a diploma as a ticket overseas will regret their decision. But Mr Stark assumes that people in poor countries tend to demand too little education. A person's productivity depends on the skills of those around him, as well as his own. Because of these spillovers, an individual's education is worth more to the economy as a whole than it is to himself, and he will underinvest in it as a result. Mr Stark sees limited emigration as one way to fix this market failure.

India's software engineers are perhaps an example of this principle at work. Indian students had little reason to learn computer coding before there was a software industry to employ them. But such an industry could not take root without computer engineers to man it. The dream of a job in Silicon Valley, however, was enough to lure many of India's bright young things into coding, and that was enough to hatch an indigenous software industry where none existed before.

India's valley-dwellers represent just one contingent in a much larger diaspora. According to the most exhaustive study of the brain drain, released last month by the World Bank, there were 1.04m Indian-born people, educated past secondary school, living in the 30 relatively rich countries of the OECD in 2000. (An unknown number of them acquired their education outside their country of birth, the report notes.) This largely successful diaspora is more than just something to envy and emulate. Its members can be a source of know-how and money, and provide valuable entrées into foreign markets and supply chains.

But Messrs Kapur and McHale think India's relatively happy experience with its educated emigrés is more likely to be the exception than the rule. Its million-strong brain drain represents just 4.3% of its vast graduate population, according to the Bank. By contrast, almost 47% of Ghana's highly educated native sons live in the OECD; for Guyana, the figure is 89%. This is not a stimulative leeching of talent; it is a hemorrhage.

Emigration, as Mr Stark suggests, might be a spur to greater accomplishment, and the poor world's talent, like Senegal's footballers, deserves a chance to compete on a global stage. But it is not easy to run a managed "emigration" policy. The drain of educated minds from poor countries is mostly determined by host countries' rules, not home countries' interests. There will be tremendous pressure to loosen those rules in the future, not least because, as the baby-boom generation retires, it will seek to "backfill the taxpaying workforce behind it," as Messrs Kapur and McHale put it. The rich world no longer welcomes the tired and the huddled; it looks set to compete ever more fiercely for the bright and the qualified.

Over the next few decades, global migration is likely to play an influential role in shaping the nature of politics and economies internationally. This timely study illuminates possible implications of migrant flows from a development perspective. The authors survey the magnitude of the poor to rich-country flows, the rich-country policies that are driving them, and the multiple channels through which skilled migration affects development. They provide a rich discussion of the policy options, as they search for those that avoid the worst losses to poor countries while maintaining the most liberal feasible international migration regime.

Kapur, Devesh, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. 2005. Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design. Oxford University Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

The modern state secures legitimacy and carries out its tasks of governance and development through a diverse range of institutions. This volume analytically assesses the design, performance, and adaptability of the principal institutions of governance in India and their critical role in a democratic polity.

It is axiomatic that societies are well governed and well organized to the extent that their public institutions can adequately manage the demands imposed on them. In India, it is commonly held that a modest record in development and governance is explained by the somewhat limited utility of many public institutions.

The volume looks at the parliament, presidency, institutions of internal accountability, the judiciary, police, and the civil service in addition to economic institutions such as the Reserve Bank of India, as also several regulatory bodies, paying special attention to the variables like autonomy, accountability, and information sharing that have affected the performance of different institutions across time.

Also included are essays that explore the critical role played by institutions in enhancing economic performance, strengthening federalism, and deepening the democratic impulse in India. In addition, they look at how electoral uncertainty has given a new lease of life to "referee institutions" like the Election Commission and the Supreme Court.

Further, the volume looks at the variations in institutional performance of the Indian State across time, and evaluates if the state has the capacity to adapt to a changing environment.

Providing detailed and original insights into the working of institutions and assessing the manner in which they assist, strengthen, thwart, manipulate, and subvert each other, this unique volume will be of interest to a scholarly audience in political science, public administration, and political sociology in addition to bureaucrats and policy planners, journalists, activists, and an informed general audience.

2004

The turn to "geography" in the social sciences has been evident in recent years, but the insights from this literature have largely bypassed scholarship on international organizations (IOs). Does geography matter at all for how IOs behave? We argue that, from both rationalist and constructivist approaches, there are theoretical reasons why location, controlling for power and interest, affects institutional design and performance. We suggest how preferences over location arise; what determines where IOs are located; and how and when location affects the design and performance of IOs. To assess the plausibility of our ideas, we provide empirical examples of the effect and importance of location, focusing on evidence from specific IOs; evidence regarding how location influences the staffing of IOs; and evidence on the clustering of IOs geographically.

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Kapur, Devesh. "Where You Sit Is Where You Stand: The Behavioral Impact of Geography on International Organizations." Working Paper 04–06, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, September 2004.

2003

Remittances are emerging as an important source of external development finance. They have been growing in both absolute volume, as well as relative to other sources of external finance. Perhaps even more important, they are the most stable source of external finance and are providing crucial social insurance in many countries afflicted by economic and political crises. But, as with all substantial external resource flows, the effects of remittances are complex.

The paper examines this growing external resource flows to developing countries. It first highlights the severe limitations in data, a sharp contrast to other sources of external finance. It then analyzes (based on this limited data), the key trends in remittance flows. The paper then examines the many complex economic and political effects of remittances. It highlights that while the effects of remittances are greatest on transient poverty, the long–term effects on structural poverty are less clear, principally because the consequences for economic development in general are not well understood. The paper then suggests some policy options to enhance these flows and maximize the benefits. Finally it concludes with some suggestions for future work.

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2001

As the international community reflects on the forms and magnitude of the assistance that can be rendered to Pakistan, it is worth pondering how a country that has been one of the world's largest recipients of foreign financial aid—nearly $58 billion from 1960-98, the third-highest of any country—still finds itself in such a beleaguered and impoverished state. In particular, the international community has to grapple with the reality that the very institution whose help is critical in efforts to break the power of terrorists groups in South Asia, the Pakistani military, is also deeply responsible for creating and nurturing these groups. The role of the Pakistani army is central not only to the well being of Pakistan's citizens, and to the region. It is also critical to stopping the global spread of terrorism.

Pakistan's current economic, political and social fragility is primarily the result of the country's history as a beneficiary of geostrategic rents—from the U.S. during the 1950s and `60s, and again in the '80s; from the Middle East, especially in the '70s and '80s; and from China in the '90s. These substantial rents have shaped the country's political economy and its institutions. And they have underpinned the continued preeminence of the Pakistani military even as militaries in most other developing countries have gone back to the barracks.

The consequences have been devastating. Internally, Pakistan's institutions have atrophied, which has in turn provided the justification for the military to maintain its monopoly on power. Gen. Pervez Musharraf has promised to return the country to full democracy with provincial and federal elections in October 2002. And yet there is ample evidence to suggest that the proposed power devolution, carried out via constitutional reforms, will actually marginalize secular political parties and the civilian bureaucracy, thereby allowing the army an even wider role in the country's political future.

Moreover, the military's hegemonic role has had a negative effect on the nation's economy. The military has claimed a disproportionate fraction of the country's modest resources while expenditures on health, education and business development programs have suffered. Even today, military expenditures are twice that of the latter, in a country that has one of the weakest indicators of human development.

Another consequence stems from the chronic quest for legitimacy that authoritarian regimes need to retain power. Pakistan's military has used two instruments to shore up its domestic support. First, beginning with President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in the early '80s, the military cultivated the Islamic religious establishment using religious parties to outflank their mainstream counterparts. This Faustian bargain resulted in the rapid growth of Islamic schools, the madraasas, with financial support from Saudi Arabia, which was eager to enlarge the influence of Wahabist Islam and the Islamicization of the Pakistani military and society. The weakening of secular political parties further justified the military establishment's grip on political power.

The second instrument of the military government's legitimacy comes from the perennial tension with India. The need to "protect the integrity of Pakistan" against the alleged wily machinations of India has always been a handy tool to whip up nationalist sentiment and justify the military's hold on power. The May 1999 Kargil invasion, engineered by Gen. Musharraf even as the country's own civilian government was engaged in a dialogue with its Indian counterpart, ensured that dialogue was still-born and the military's hegemony unchallenged.

But even if the Pakistani security establishment's bleeding of India in Kashmir can be justified by India's actions, it is Afghanistan, much more than India, that has suffered egregiously from the Pakistani military's actions. Driven by its obsession with India, the Pakistani military sought to create a client state in Afghanistan in its quest for "strategic depth," and thereby build a staging area from which to infiltrate Kashmir.

From funding, logistics and indirect military support, the Pakistani military intervened in Afghanistan's affairs to a degree that even the superpowers rarely managed during the Cold War. Although the ultimate rationale of the Pakistani security establishment's involvement in Afghanistan has been India, the net result was to further hasten the destruction of the country begun by the Soviets.

A third instrument of control has been the military's contention that it is a protector of Muslims throughout South Asia. This claim is made by an institution that was responsible for one of the world's worst slaughters of Muslims in the last century—at least half a million people in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.

Western, and in particular American policy makers and media, have long been apologists for the Pakistani army. Nevertheless, though the strategic calculations of the Cold War have given way to the tactical imperatives of the current Afghan campaign, this alone cannot justify blind support for the military, nor glossing over the long-term consequences of that support for Pakistan and the region, and the West itself.

There can be no doubt that given Pakistan's importance on the global stage and its current weaknesses, the country both needs and deserves considerable and sustained international financial assistance. But in doing so, there should be a clear target for the aid: a country and its people. The international community must ensure that, unlike the foreign assistance offered to Pakistan in the 1980s, new resources don't simply help to further strengthen the very institution that has been at the root of the country's—and increasingly the region's—problems.

Proposals to cut Pakistan's debt servicing and reschedule the debt are basically steps in the right direction. However, unless the resulting savings are channeled toward sharply increasing social expenditures on human capital development and poverty-oriented programs, they will serve little more than to further entrench the military regime. It is not surprising that during his recent visit to Washington, Gen. Musharraf was more interested in securing the release of a package of F-16 fighter jets from the Bush administration than in obtaining aid for his country's devastated education system.

External assistance should therefore be contingent on curbing military expenditures (which continue to be one of the highest in the world) as well as funding for the madraasas that serve as jihadi prep schools (although it should be emphasized that many madraasas are simply parochial schools and not training grounds for zealots). However, these initiatives will also require the cooperation of "moderate" Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose citizens are an important source of funds not only in Pakistan, but also in other parts of South and Southeast Asia.

The manner in which the international community helps Pakistan will have broader implications as it grapples to assist other weak, undemocratic states. Unfortunately, for much of the past half-century, foreign aid has too often served as the palatable cover for what were essentially bribes to friendly regimes to secure their cooperation than as resources whose intent was the long term political and economic development of a country and its people. In the process, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent with little to show for it; regimes that have caused untold misery to their people in a variety of contexts have been entrenched; donor institutions have been seriously discredited. This is a lesson American policy makers should heed in helping Pakistan to secure a promising future for its 140 million people.

2000

Although international institutions are a ubiquitous feature of international life, little is know about their trajectories of change. This paper attempts to address this lacuna by examining processes of change in international institutions, in particular the subset of international institutions known as inter–governmental organizations. The purpose of this paper is not to develop a general theory of change in international institutions but rather to develop limited generalizations about causal mechanisms and their consequences. It first examines the rationale and purposes of international organizations – before we can ask how and why particular types of organizations change, we need to understand why they exist in the first place. It then examines the trajectories of change in international organizations by posing three, interrelated, questions. One, what factors drive (or hinder) change in international institutions and organizations and what are the principal instruments and mechanisms that leverage change? Two, what factors explain variations in the pace and direction of change? And three, what are the consequences of change both for the institutions themselves and for their members? Finally the paper outlines a research agenda to develop a broad theoretical framework for understanding causal mechanisms of change in international organizations.

164_helsinki3.wcfia_.pdf
1998

In recent years, the World Bank has been at the vanguard in pressing for a circumscribed role for the State in developing countries. It therefore comes as somewhat of a surprise that the 1997 World Development Report (WDR–the World Bank?s annual flagship publication), The State in a Changing World, underscores the continuing significance of the State in LDCs.

The WDR is generally successful as a didactic device, both in refocusing attention on roles and capabilities that enhance state effectiveness and as a guide to policy makers on the "what": the State?s role must focus on social and economic fundamentals, but should always be tailored to capabilities. It is, however, much weaker when it comes to the "how". Its recipe for reinvigorating institutional capabilities—increased competition, decentralization and participation, and international collective action—is neither controversial nor novel. Myriad exercises at quantification to "prove" its case, especially with regard to the importance of State "credibility", are often misplaced and analytically flawed. And by avoiding contentious issues at the heart of the State, in particular those related to politics and power, and instead genuflecting to current intellectual fashions, the report says more about the World Bank than the role of the State in LDCs.

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Working Paper 02–04, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2002.