Prof Adnan Khan and Prof Timothy Besley

This course is available on the Double Master of Public Administration (LSE-University of Toronto), MPA Dual Degree (LSE and Columbia), MPA Dual Degree (LSE and Hertie), MPA Dual Degree (LSE and NUS), MPA Dual Degree (LSE and Sciences Po), MPA Dual Degree (LSE and Tokyo), Master of Public Administration and Master of Public Policy. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Some understanding of economics and quantitative methods is desirable.

The course will offer students the analytical frameworks and practitioners’ knowhow for understanding public organisations and the challenges in design and implementation of public policies.  Public organisations are key determinants of state capacity and this course will draw primarily on economics, particularly principal agent theory, and political economy to understand these. The lectures will take different views of public organisations: a micro, personnel-economics view; an organizational level perspective; and a heterodox approach drawing on the recent literature from several disciplines on identity, values and norms.

The seminars will have an applied focus and will deal with intractable public policy problems confronting states and public organisations and reasons why it is so difficult to deliver transformative and sustainable change on the ground. The group work during seminars will use a systematic and structured framework to identify pressing policy problems, diagnose the underlying causes of these problems using evidence, and design, test, implement and refine policy innovations. There will be a lot of emphasis on learning-centric approaches to transforming public organisations and to diagnosing and dealing with the challenges of policy implementation and political authorisation and the skill sets needed to address these challenges.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars totalling a minimum of 35 hours across Lent Term.  This year teaching will be delivered through a combination of online lectures, with seminars taking place in person where possible and where conditions allow.

Students will be provided regular and weekly feedback on their group work during LT.

Key readings:

• Timothy Besley, Robin Burgess, Adnan Khan and Guo Xu. (2021). Bureaucracy and Development. Annual Review of Economics. Forthcoming.
• Besley, Timothy and Torsten Persson. 2014. “The Causes and Consequences of Development Clusters: State Capacity, Peace and Income”. Annual Review of Economics. Volume 6:927-949.
• Finan, Frederico, Benjamin Olken, and Rohini Pande. 2015. “The Personnel Economics of the State”, The Handbook of Field Experiments.
• IGC Evidence Paper. 2019. “State Effectiveness”
• Cristina Corduneanu-Huc, Alexander Hamilton and Issel Masses Ferrer. 2012. “Understanding Policy Change: How to Apply Political Economy Concepts in Practice.” Washington D.C.: World Bank Publications.
• Andrews, M., L. Pritchett & M Woolcock. (2017). Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action. Oxford University Press.
• Parkhurst, Justin. 2017. “The politics of evidence: from evidence-based policy to the good governance of evidence”. Routledge Studies in Governance and Public Policy.

Essay (50%) in the period between LT and ST.
Policy memo (20%) and group presentation (30%) in the LT.

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