Person:
Cloutier, Mathieu

Global Governance Unit
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Cloutier, Mathieu
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Economics, Political Economy
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Global Governance Unit
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Last updated: May 23, 2024
Biography
Mathieu Cloutier is an economist in the francophone West Africa unit of the Governance Global Practice. His operational and lending supervision work includes decentralization, service delivery, and PFM projects with a special focus on the Sahel and fragile countries such as Niger and Mali. He has also been involved in knowledge and analytics products centered on political economy, citizen engagement, DRM, and SOE. Recently, he led the development of an empirical framework for social contract diagnostics for the regional report on Social Contract for Stability, Equity and Prosperity in Africa. The empirical framework is currently being applied in multiple settings for country assessments and SCDs. Prior to joining the Bank in 2017 as a Young Professional, Mathieu obtained a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. His doctoral research investigated the impact of decentralization on corruption and bribes paid by firms to local officials.

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    What Drives Citizens’ Trust in State Institutions ? Large-Scale Survey Evidence on Process and Outcome-Based Trust in Morocco
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-23) Zovighian, Diane; Cloutier, Mathieu; Bove, Abel
    What drives citizen’s trust in state institutions There are longstanding debates on the pathways towards institutional trust: is trust driven by citizen’s perceptions of policy outcomes or by their perceptions of the integrity and credibility of policy processes This paper investigates this question using data from a large-scale survey of 5,916 Moroccans and argues that process matters more than outcomes for trust-building. The paper first shows that Moroccans’ trust in institutions is strongly associated with positive evaluations of policy outcomes—including satisfaction with the delivery of public goods and services and with government’s economic performance. It then provides evidence that institutional trust is even more strongly and robustly associated with the quality of governance processes, and in particular with the perception that institutions function with integrity and make credible commitments. Going beyond policy variables, the paper also provides complementary evidence that institutional trust is contingent on individual-level social capital, including social trust, and socio-demographic factors. The conclusion briefly lays out the policy implications of this research and areas for future investigation.
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    Social Contracts for Development: Bargaining, Contention, and Social Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank and Paris: Agence française de développement, 2021-12-22) Watts, Michael; Cloutier, Mathieu; Harborne, Bernard; Isser, Deborah; Santos, Indhira
    Sub-Saharan Africa has achieved significant gains in reducing the levels of extreme poverty in recent decades, yet the region continues to experience challenges across the development indicators, including energy access, literacy, delivery of services and goods, and jobs skills, as well as low levels of foreign direct investment. Exacerbating the difficulties faced by many countries are the sequelae of conflict, such as internal displacement and refugee migration. Social Contracts for Development: Bargaining, Contention, and Social Inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa builds on recent World Bank attention to the real-life social and political economy factors that underlie the power dynamic and determine the selection and implementation of policies. Applying a social contract approach to development policy, the authors provide a framework and proposals on how to measure such a framework to strengthen policy and operational engagements in the region. The key message is that Africa’s progress toward shared prosperity requires looking beyond technical policies to understand how the power dynamics and citizen-state relations shape the menu of implementable reforms. A social contract lens can help diagnose constraints, explain outbreaks of unrest, and identify opportunities for improving outcomes. Social contract assessments can leverage the research on the nexus of politics, power relations, and development outcomes, while bringing into focus the instruments that underpin state-society relations and foster citizen voice. Social contracts also speak directly to many contemporary development trends, such as the policy-implementation gap, the diagnostic of binding constraints to development, fragility and conflict, taxation and service delivery, and social protection. The authors argue that policies that reflect the demands and expectations of the people lead to more stable and equitable outcomes than those that do not. Their focus is on how social contracts are forged in the region, how they change and why, and how a better understanding of social contracts can inform reform efforts. The analysis includes the additional impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic on government-citizen relationships.
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    Social Contracts in Sub-Saharan Africa: Concepts and Measurements
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10) Cloutier, Mathieu
    In 2019, an Independent Evaluation Group review on the growing use of social contracts terminology by the World Bank concluded that social contract diagnostics are useful analytical innovations with relevant operational implications, particularly in situations of transition and social unrest. But it also found that the World Bank had no formal, conceptual framework or shared understanding of social contracts, leading to uneven quality of use. This paper proposes a framework and quantitative measures to describe social contracts. First, the paper presents a literature review on social contract theory and its applications in development. Second, it proposes a conceptual framework based on three core aspects of social contracts: (i) the citizen-state bargain, (ii) social outcomes that form the contents of the social contract, and (iii) resilience of the social contract in terms of how citizens’ expectations are being met. Third, an empirical measurement strategy is described to quantify these aspects through six dimensions and 14 subdimensions using available indicators from multiple sources. An empirical analysis then successfully tests some of the framework’s predictions and finds indicative evidence for an operationally interesting result: that state capacity without civil capacity is often not sufficient to generate thicker and more inclusive social contracts, and that these better outcomes lead to less misalignment with expectations and to less social unrest. Fourth, the quantitative measures are used to present three comparative maps for the general characterization of social contracts at the cross-country level.