HOW IMPORTANT IS CAPTURE?
Groups led by women were more likely than groups led by men to prioritize investments in local health clinics over hospitals. Unlike groups led by men, they also preferred investments in improving transportation services rather than investments in improving roads and expanding road networks. They were also more likely to accept higher taxation of windfall earnings and to opt for saving rather than spending windfalls. Furthermore, groups led by older adults were more likely than groups led by younger people to emphasize health as a national priority and to favor commercial transport over passenger transport and better roads over public transportation services. Meetings led by women and older people also reached much higher levels of consensus than meetings led by men and younger people. The only published study that has collected ex ante preference data for public good projects is Labonne and Chase (2009). They find substantial evidence of capture by local leaders at the project proposal stage but only in more unequal villages with a less politically active population. Local leaders in such villages, they find, exercise greater influence over resource allocation at meetings at the supra-village level, where proposed projects are approved. Gugerty and Kremer (2008) take a different approach. They look at the impact of a participatory agricultural project in rural Kenya on group membership and agricultural productivity. The project provided leadership training and agricultural inputs to small self-help organizations, most of whose members were poor women with little education. The project spent $674 per group, or an average of $34 per member, half of which was allocated to agricultural inputs, which were provided to the group as a whole. As the typical comparison group had $243 in assets before the project started, this spending represented a large increase in the group’s capital stock.16 The study finds that the groups selected for the intervention were far more likely to attract new members and that new members were also likely to be more educated, to have formal sector income, and to take over group leadership positions.17 Moreover, although exit rates were similar in program and comparison groups, more members left the program groups because of intragroup conflicts. Older female members, who were among the most vulnerable, were also disproportionately more likely to leave. In sum, the program appears to have unleashed a process in which group membership and leadership moved into the hands of younger and better-educated women. It also induced the entry of more men and
One study finds substantial evidence of capture by local leaders at the project proposal stage . . .
. . . but only in more unequal villages with a less politically active population.
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