Person:
Mansuri, Ghazala
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Rural Land, Labor and Credit Markets; Microfinance; Poverty Dynamics; Political Economy of Participatory Development; Field Experiments in Governance and Politics; Impact Evaluation of Institutional and Governance Reforms
Degrees
Departments
Poverty Reduction and Equity Group, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
July 6, 2023
Biography
Ghazala Mansuri is a Lead Economist in the Poverty Reduction and Equity Group. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University and has published extensively in leading journals in Economics and Development. Her research spans four broad areas: Rural land, labor and credit markets; the economics of household behavior; the political economy of participatory development and institutional and governance reforms for development. Her research on the political economy of local development includes a number of evaluations of participatory development programs.
Publication Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
-
Publication
Designing Wage Contracts in Multi-Goal Organizations
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01)Economic theory has long suggested the use of monetary incentives to motivate workers. In practice, however, public bureaucracies and nonprofit organizations are driven by a broader mission that often involves multiple operational goals, not all of which may translate equally well into measurable indicators. The authors worked with the largest partner of a prominent development organization in Pakistan called the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) and its largest partner National Rural Support Program (NRSP) who share the same mission of reducing poverty. The study was conducted in all thirty five branch offices located in fifteen districts across Sindh, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, where NRSP was active. These results indicate that both production and cost complementarities are empirically relevant. Finally, the results suggest that financial incentives that crowd out intrinsic motivation can also affect performance by undermining the willingness of motivated employees to work in teams. -
Publication
The Impact of Social Mobilization on Health Service Delivery and Health Outcomes: Evidence from Rural Pakistan
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01)This paper uses a randomized community development program in rural Pakistan to assess the impact of citizen engagement on the quality of public health services. The program had a strong emphasis on organizing women, who also identified health services as a development priority at baseline. Assessing the program at midline, the paper finds that the mobilization effort alone had a significant impact on the performance of village-based health providers. The study detects economically large improvements in pregnancy and well-baby visits by lady health workers, as well as increased utilization of pre- and post-natal care by pregnant women. In contrast, the quality of supra-village health services did not improve, underscoring the importance of community enforcement and monitoring capacity for improving service delivery. -
Publication
Mission and the Bottom Line: Performance Incentives in a Multi-Goal Organization
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-12)The impact of performance pay in institutions with multiple goals depends on complementarities in the disutility cost of effort and how different tasks interact to achieve each goal. Workers of a mission-oriented nonprofit were randomly assigned to one of two bonus schemes, each incentivizing one of its two main operational goals: the performance of its microcredit program and the strengthening of community institutions of the poor. This study finds that the credit bonus improved credit-related outcomes but it undermined the social outcome. In contrast, the social bonus advanced the social mission as well as the microcredit program, but only for employees working alone, undermining the performance of employees working in teams. These results cannot be explained by a standard multitask principal-agent model featuring only complementarities in the disutility cost of effort. Instead, they suggest that production complementarities are also relevant. -
Publication
Decentralization and Redistribution: Irrigation Reform in Pakistan's Indus Basin
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-02)Does decentralizing the allocation of public resources reduce rent-seeking and improve equity? This paper studies a governance reform in Pakistan's vast Indus Basin irrigation system. Using canal discharge measurements across all of Punjab province, the analysis finds that water theft increased on channels taken over by local farmer organizations compared with channels that remained bureaucratically managed, leading to substantial wealth redistribution. The increase in water theft was greater along channels with larger landowners situated upstream. These findings are consistent with a model in which decentralization accentuates the political power of local elites by shifting the arena in which water rights are contested. -
Publication
Governing the Commons?: Water and Power in Pakistan's Indus Basin
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-02)Surface irrigation is a common pool resource characterized by asymmetric appropriation opportunities across upstream and downstream water users. Large canal systems are also predominantly managed by the state. This paper studies water allocation under an irrigation bureaucracy subject to corruption and rent-seeking. Data on the landholdings and political influence of nearly a quarter million irrigators in Pakistan's vast Indus Basin watershed allow the construction of a novel index of lobbying power. Consistent with a model of misgovernance, the decline in water availability and land values from channel head to tail is accentuated along canals having greater lobbying power at the head than at the tail. -
Publication
Climate and Equity: A Framework to Guide Policy Action
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-06)Reducing the impact of climate change on poor and vulnerable households is essential to hastening poverty reduction. In thinking about policies that do this, it is useful to apply the same hazard, exposure and vulnerability framework that is often used to understand the physical impacts of climate change and add the non-climate benefits and costs to households that these policies can also bring. Policies that reduce hazards and vulnerability whilst bringing non-climate benefits—triple win policies—are not very common, but where possible they should be prioritized. Policies that reduce vulnerability and bring non-climate benefits are more common. However, some development policies that bring non-climate benefits, particularly in higher-income and higher-growth countries, may increase emissions by enough to worsen future hazards, so their emissions impact needs to be managed with compensating actions. Policies that reduce the hazards faced by poor households are needed, and the non-climate cost of these policies on poor people should be minimized or compensated where it cannot be avoided.