Institutions & Political Economy

Parallel governance institutions built by Maoist rebels during Nepal's civil war led to lasting improvements in political participation among historically excluded groups, more representative candidate selection across parties, and greater local gove...

Local elections have the potential to disrupt the ‘business-as-usual’ culture that often settles in bureaucracies. Evidence from village elections in Indonesia shows that changes in leadership improve information flows between citizens and the state,...

Over the past 150 years China moved from a closed, self-sufficient economy to the world's largest trading nation through forced opening after the Opium Wars, a Soviet-style planned economy, Deng Xiaoping's 1978 market reforms, and WTO accession in 2001, with industrial policy now pushing it up the value chain into sectors like electric vehicles.

New evidence from colonial India shows how economic ideas can influence civil servants and shape policy for decades, determining whether governments respond decisively to crisis or not at all.

A field experiment in Colombia found that disclosing the identity-based criteria used to select students for a free training programme reduced enrolment, suggesting that how targeted invitations are framed shapes whether intended beneficiaries actual...

When women in Saudi Arabia gained the right to drive, not all benefited equally: while some gained employment, others saw little labour market gain and instead faced tighter restrictions on their economic autonomy.

A new book argues that interpersonal violence – homicide, intimate partner violence, and child abuse – costs the world far more than war, yet receives a fraction of the policy attention. Drawing on victimisation surveys and value-of-statistical-life estimates, the authors put the annual cost of interpersonal violence at roughly $30 trillion, compared with $3.7 trillion for collective violence.