The provision of public goods and services - education, healthcare, sanitation, potable water and other government benefits - are linked to issues of governance. The Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) together with the Center for Latin American Studies will host a conference on May 18-19 at Stanford University to explore how governance impacts the provision of public goods and services throughout the world.

The conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of economists, political scientists, policymakers, and public health researchers to present on-going research on the links between governance and public goods provisions. The conference will also focus on government corruption, electoral clientelism and the critical role of external actors in the provision and delivery of public goods.

According to Beatriz Magaloni, the director of the Program on Poverty and Governance at CDDRL, “A goal of the conference is to present pioneering research on the major issues facing public goods provision in developing economies and to explore a variety of institutional, political, and international factors that work to improve or hinder government capacity and accountability in service delivery.”

Conference speakers include: Stephen D. Krasner, professor of international relations and deputy director of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, commenting on external actors and the provision of goods in areas of limited statehood; Stuti Khemani, senior economist at the World Bank, who will speak about information access and public health benefits; Miriam Goldman, visiting research scholar from Princeton University, who will examine corruption and electricity in India; Edward Miguel, director of the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley, who will present on institutional reform through minority participation; and James D. Fearon, professor of political science at Stanford University and CDDRL affiliated faculty, and David Laitin, professor of political science and Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) affiliated faculty who will both serve as distinguished discussants.

All sessions will be held in the CISAC Conference room, 2^nd floor of Encina Hall Central, and are free and open to the public. To view the complete agenda and RSVP to the conference, please click here.

Retraction: In June 2012, Stanford researchers Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid retracted the research findings explained in the following article. Their findings, presented in the essay, "Does development assistance for health really displace government health spending? Reassessing the evidence," contained errors in statistical model choice and reporting. The essay was published May 8, 2012, by the journal PLoS Medicine. The researchers erroneously concluded that there was no significant displacement of foreign aid. When they discovered their mistake, they informed editors at PLoS Medicine and moved to correct the record. The editors agreed with the need for the retraction and accepted the authors’ explanation of their error. The retraction can be read at www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001214.

When a 2010 study concluded that about half the money given to international governments for providing health care services isn’t used as intended, skeptics who argued that foreign aid is largely wasted were handed a powerful piece of data to bolster their claims.

But Stanford researchers Rajaie S. Batniji and Eran Bendavid say those findings are flawed. In an article featured in the May 8th edition of PLoS Medicine, Batniji and Bendavid say the two-year-old study by researchers at the University of Washington should not be used to guide decisions about how much money to give and who should get it.

“We can’t say that there’s absolutely no displacement of foreign aid, but these earlier findings are too tenuous for the basis of policy,” said Batniji, an affiliate of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Batniji and Bendavid, an affiliate of FSI’s Stanford Health Policy and an assistant professor of medicine, are taking on the 2010 study – which appeared in the Lancet – at a critical time for foreign assistance programs.

The United States, which gives about half of all the world’s health aid, plans to chop its $10 billion budget by about 4 percent in the coming fiscal year. That’s the first cut in more than a decade. And officials have shown no signs of switching their preference of bypassing national governments as recipients of health aid, funneling more than half of U.S. support to non-governmental organizations instead.

Batniji and Bendavid decided to re-analyze the data used by the University of Washington researchers after meeting with policymakers who pointed to the study as a cautionary tale of foreign governments that waste and mismanage money earmarked for health programs.

“People were citing the Lancet piece, saying this was starting to shape how they thought about giving money,” said Batniji, who is also a resident physician at Stanford Medical Center. “But when we started asking questions about what the actual displacement looks like, the answers didn’t seem very compelling or reasonable.”

Taking a fresh look at the same numbers used for the 2010 study – public financing data culled from the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund – the researchers saw a different story emerge about the use of foreign aid in the health sector.

Once Batniji and Bendavid excluded conflicting and outlying data, such as huge discrepancies between WHO and IMF estimates and information about countries that were getting very small amounts of money from other countries, “there was no significant displacement of foreign aid,” Bendavid said.

The Stanford researchers’ findings are poised to influence a debate among policymakers and donors over whether it’s more efficient to give international assistance slated for health spending to government agencies or NGOs.

“We want to free donors of feeling that if they give money directly to governments, the money will be offset and used for an unintended purpose,” Batniji said. “The concern about displacement really amplifies the demands we make on governments for how they use the money. And that is at odds with a recent movement to let foreign governments set their own agendas for how to spend money.”

The research conducted by Batniji and Bendavid was supported by FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund and the Dr. George Rosenkranz Prize awarded to Bendavid in 2010.