Why Guarantee Employment?Three Essays on the World’s Largest Public-Works Program.

Public-works Program;India;National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme;Safety Net;Economics;Social Sciences;Business;Economics

Zimmermann, Laura V.Arunachalam, Raj ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Public-works Program;    India;    National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme;    Safety Net;    Economics;    Social Sciences;    Business;    Economics;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107155/lvzimmer_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

The Indian government started implementing the world’s largest public-works program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), in 2006. With a legal guarantee of 100 days of public employment per year for all rural households, NREGS is the flagship example of the resurgence of interest in public-works programs in developing countries in the last couple of years. This may be surprising given the available evidence of the limited success of such schemes in developed countries and of severe implementation problems in developing countries. My dissertation therefore seeks to understand what benefits NREGS created that may have made its introduction optimal from a government’s viewpoint despite the known drawbacks.Chapter 1 reconstructs the government algorithm that the Indian government used to assign districts to implementation phases, which can then be exploited in a regression-discontinuity design to analyze the program impacts empirically. The chapter focuses on the labor-market impacts of NREGS and sets up a household time-allocation model that allows households to take up the scheme both as an alternative form of employment and as a safety net after bad economic shocks. The empirical results suggest that the program provides a safety net but has no large other labor-market impacts.Chapter 2 uses the same empirical strategy to study the impact of the program on the Maoist conflict, which the Indian prime minister referred to as India’s biggest security challenge. The results show that violence increases in the short run, which is driven by a rise in police-initiated attacks. The paper discusses and tests the implications of a number of potential theories, but finds that the empirical patterns are most consistent with the introduction of NREGS making civilians more willing to share information on insurgents with the police, which in turn improves the police’s effectiveness in tracking down rebels.Chapter 3 analyzes the impacts of NREGS during the next general elections. My empirical results using a regression-discontinuity design suggest that both the government parties and incumbents of any party benefit from the scheme, but that these effects are concentrated in areas with high implementation quality and longer exposure to the scheme.