He was addressing the second day of 'Second International Conference on Applied Development Economics' organized by Lahore School of Economics. The authors run a field experiment with public procurement officers by randomly providing them with greater autonomy, incentives, or both.
According to the observations when procurement officers are provided both autonomy and incentives, the observed effects are similar to the autonomy treatment arm. He concluded his talk with the following main insight: if supervisors are more corrupt then giving autonomy to procurement officers would increase efficiency but giving incentives in this case will not be effective in reducing capture. His work illustrates that allocation of authority depends on relative misalignment of implementing versus monitoring agents.
Research Director, State Bank of Pakistan; Research Associate, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics Dr Ali Choudhary explored trends in management practices among a sample of 4,500 manufacturing firms in Pakistan. His work showed that firms which have more skilled employees, who are larger, older and/or more export oriented have more structured management practices while those in areas that experienced increases in terrorist activity over the study period had the biggest deterioration in management practices. In addition, the authors found that efficient management is associated with superior firm performance as measured by productivity, profitability and jobs growth.
Dean and Professor, Lahore School of Economics Dr Azam Chaudhry, chaired the session on firms and entrepreneurship. Associate Professor of Economics and Deputy Director, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Dr Simon Quinn presented results from a novel field experiment with young professionals in Ethiopia who were exposed to firm management in practice.
The session on 'political economy, governance and institutional capacity' was chaired by Adnan Khan. The first speaker in the session was Assistant Professor Lahore School of Economics Dr Waqar Wadho who shared results from ongoing work on measuring and limiting corruption in the Pakistani bureaucracy. His work estimates the rate of overall corruption and misuse of public funds in the bureaucracy and tests the effectiveness of four anticorruption policy interventions. He concluded his talk by saying that social sanctions, wage incentives and community monitoring could reduce corruption.