Local Institutions in Postwar Sierra Leone

Project Overview:
Warfare may have a major impact on long-run economic development. War destroys infrastructure - including clinics, roads, and power lines - and leaves physical and psychological scars on survivors, their institutions and societies. Yet despite some interesting evidence from case studies, systematic empirical research examining the effect of war on economic development is rare. This project addresses these issues through a detailed micro-empirical study of the impact of the brutal 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone on post-war institutional, political, and economic outcomes.

There are three main aspects of the research:

• We have obtained new, district-level information on the extent of war damage from both Sierra Leone government and United Nations sources. According to U.N. data collected in the immediate aftermath of the war in 2002, in some areas over 80% of homes were destroyed, and in many regions the majority of government buildings, schools, and clinics were also damaged, while in other areas of the country there was minimal damage. Villages and districts that were more affected by the war will be compared to districts less affected by the war, controlling for geographic characteristics and a range of baseline conditions, in order to understand war impacts on local public finance outcomes, institutions, and economic wellbeing.
• We will use a randomized evaluation in two rural districts of Sierra Leone to study the impact of a Community Driven Development (CDD) program on local public finance outcomes, institutions, and economic wellbeing. CDD programs emphasize community empowerment and local fundraising as a route to sustainable economic progress, and CDD interventions typically consist of a series of village meetings and training sessions that aim to further these goals. These programs have been widely adopted by international development donors in recent years, drawing billions of dollars of funding, but their benefits for development have recently come under question. This area is of intense interest within development economics today, and a rigorous study of the cost-benefit structure of CDD may be particularly important for reconstruction in post-conflict societies.
  Of 240 villages in the sample, half will be randomly assigned to receive an intensive CDD intervention during 2006-7 through a program called "Go Bifo" (which means "Move Ahead" in Krio, the dominant local language), funded by the Government of Sierra Leone and the World Bank. Local institutional and economic outcomes in the 120 program villages will be compared to 120 comparison villages over 2006-2007 to gauge CDD impacts.
• We will conduct a series of experimental economics "games" in 2006 and/or 2007 in the Go Bifo sample villages (both program and comparison). Choices that individuals make in laboratories have increasingly been found to correlate with a variety of important real-world economic outcomes. We will run a series of well-known games that have been played in dozens of settings, including in the U.C. Berkeley X-Lab. These games will focus on questions of fairness, equity, reciprocity, and cooperation, important issues in understanding economic and institutional development in post-war Sierra Leone. The goal of this aspect of the study is to gauge war impacts (by comparing levels of cooperation in games across villages that had more versus less war damage), as well as to estimate the impact of CDD by comparing game outcomes in Go Bifo program versus comparison villages.

Sample:
240 Villages
Main Results:
Project ongoing

Principal Investigators:
Edward Miguel and Rachel Glennerster (MIT)

Academic Publications

John Bellows and Edward Miguel, War and Institutions: New Evidence from Sierra Leone, American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, 2006, 96(2):394-399.