Date: 2014
Type: Working Paper
Community-driven development and social capital : evidence from Morocco
Working Paper, EUI MWP, 2014/02
CHI NGUYEN, Tu, RIEGER, Matthias, Community-driven development and social capital : evidence from Morocco, EUI MWP, 2014/02 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/31037
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
Community-driven development programs rest on the principle of development aid through active community participation. Their demand-driven and bottom-up nature of decision making is expected to promote pro-social behaviors. This paper studies the impact of one such program in rural Morocco on social capital. We use behavioral experiments in the field to measure social capital among households living in communes with and without the policy intervention. Using a regression discontinuity framework, we find that community-driven development has a positive but weak impact on public goods contribution. This public responsibility increases with treatment intensity as proxied by the amount of total project spending. While the program has no effect on altruism, evidence seems to suggest that it reduces interpersonal trust. These mixed results signal that social capital responds rather slowly, if at all, to a shift from a centralized to a more localized decision-making process.
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/31037
ISSN: 1830-7728
Series/Number: EUI MWP; 2014/02
Keyword(s): Community-driven development Social capital Field experiments C93 D03 I38 O12 O22