Recent Blog Feature - Governance for Development: World Bank?

Hi everyone. I am very excited to share a blog titled Why Indonesia needs to prioritize capital budgets to meet its development goals which was published on the World Bank's "Governance for Development" blog. At the risk of making this a blog about a blog, this is to lead you to the link should you have an interest. We share some findings of some institutional challenges to slow and low capital budget execution in Indonesia. This is based on rigorous empirical analysis with unique data from a survey of spending units and fruitful engagement with the government. Very happy to be part of the team.

This was quite a stretch assignment for me as governance issues are not my core expertise. I was brought to the project for the empirical analysis. But in doing the econometrics and thinking about the results, I learnt quite a lot and better understand the role of institutions in development more broadly. It inevitably linked to previous work I had done on infrastructure spending in Indonesia and I enjoyed working from the other side of the challenge and engaging with the government on this important issue.

I also continue to realise that these are things that I do not know about my own country and it pushes me to find out more as well, on Malawi, on these key issues of development.

I hope you enjoy the read. And ultimately, it ended up being a blog about a blog :)