Postal address: Stockholm University/Department of Economics, SE-106 91 Stockholm
Visiting address: Universitetsvägen 10 A, Frescati, House A, floor 4 and 7
Web page: www.ne.su.se/english/
Contact person: Associate Professor Björn Tyrefors Hinnerich, phone: +46 (0)8 674 74 5. Personal web page.
South Asia related research
Björn Tyrefors Hinnerich received his PhD from the Stockholm School of Economics in December 2007. His research areas of interest are in Political and Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics. His dissertation work focused on how institutions shape policy using quasi-experimental methods. He is currently working on projects dealing with political economics, discrimination, education and economics of crime.
On 4 November 2014, he was granted a development research grant from the Swedish Research Council (total amount SEK 3.3 m in three years, 2015-17) for a project entitled ”Community contributions, participatory decision-making and local public goods: A field experiment in Bangladesh”.
Project abstract: It’s a very common requirement in development practice that communities contribute towards the cost of projects to provide local public goods and services. Practitioners argue that requiring communities to contribute ensures that the communities care about the outcomes of the project, making it more likely that they continue to use and maintain the assets created. More mundanely, community contributions also reduce the cost of project implementation. However, requiring communities to contribute may exclude the poorest communities from participating, and where project decisions are taken collectively, may reinforce existing inequalities within communities, by allowing those who are better able to meet the costs of contribution to exercise greater influence over decision-making processes. In general, projects that require communities to contribute are not comparable to projects without this requirement, because many other differences bias these comparisons. In our study, we will randomly assign different contribution requirements to communities who receive an otherwise identical intervention, a project to improve access to safe drinking water. In this way we will provide the first experimental evidence on whether requiring a community contribution affects the types of communities who decide to participate in the project; which community members meet the cost of the contribution; and how the requirement for a contribution influences the overall impact of the project, in terms of improving access to safe drinking water.