PDRI-DevLab is hosting a Fall 2023 Seminar Series featuring its staff and affiliates.

Topic: Foreign Aid and the Performance of Bureaucrats

Presenter: Maria Nagawa

Session Details: Foreign aid is an important source of funding for development projects in many countries. However, aid effectiveness remains equivocal and while many suggestions have been made as to why this might be the case, no work has examined the crucial impact of aid on bureaucrats, the people who implement aid projects and make states work. In this chapter of my dissertation, I focus on how aid alters bureaucrats’ incentives and performance. I utilize survey experimental data collected from 559 bureaucrats across 6 primary central government ministries in Uganda’s. I find that bureaucrats have strong preferences for both financial incentives and sources of intrinsic motivation, but high financial incentives erode preferences for intrinsic motivators. As a result, when financial incentives are high, bureaucrats are willing to work harder on aid projects and less on routine government work. By describing aid’s impact on bureaucrats’ preferences, this study fills an important gap in our understanding of aid effectiveness.

This session will be a seminar-style presentation of 40 minutes followed by Q&A of 20 minutes. Participants are not required to read a paper beforehand.

For more information, reach out to pdri-devlab@sas.upenn.edu