Linking Institutions, Security and Pro-Poor Growth in Nigeria

Policing, security, and investment.  The project will examine how differences in personal security affect individuals’ willingness to invest in public goods, in risky or deferred-payout business investments, or in collaborative business ventures.  Insecurity can be conceived of in different ways.  At the most basic, we would expect that individuals who live in high-crime areas, or areas that have experienced political violence, would feel less secure than those with higher levels of personal security.  However, perceptions of security are also likely to be affected by the quality of policing and state institutions in particular areas.  We are particularly interested in whether community policing reforms, some of which have been funded by DFID, have improved citizens’ perceptions of personal security and their orientations toward investment and state institutions.

Tax and political accountability.  The project will examine the relationship between services provision, institutional trust, and citizens’ willingness to pay taxes.  The underlying question at work here is whether visible reduction in corruption and improvement in government performance can quickly shift citizens’ orientation to the state.  State policy interventions are likely to be less effective where ties of accountability between governments and citizens are underdeveloped.  This aspect of the project therefore attempts to get at the conditions under which cooperative or consensual exchanges between governments and citizens are more possible.

Politics, identity and investment.  The final component of the research addresses how other political concerns affect risk-averseness and attitudes toward investment.  Our intuition is that areas with higher levels of communal polarization or party competition may be seen as less favourable investment climates.  This component of the research addresses whether improvements in election monitoring, communal relations, or demonetarization of electoral contestation might improve citizens’ willingness to invest, pay taxes, or undertake other actions that would enhance prospects for growth.  We also seek to establish a baseline regarding how Nigerians see the current investment climate versus their retrospective evaluation of investment climate during the last administration.  We are particularly interested in whether perception of improvement or decline differs across states and across economic classes within states.

Pilot
In order to test the wording and focus of our questionnaire we will begin by conducting a pilot survey of 600 respondents.  The pilot will be carried out in Lagos state in July 2010, which has undertaken substantial reform of tax collection in the past years, as well as a significant expansion of infrastructure development and social services provision.  The pilot will be used as a test and plausibility probe for our questionnaire and two survey-embedded experimental instruments.  In the second phase, we will then investigate whether Lagos findings can be generalized to Nigeria as a whole.

Main survey
While the main survey will clearly need to be reshaped in-line with the outcome of the pilot, we envisage a sample size of 3,000 respondents across 10 locations in 5 states during December 2010.  This will allow us to leverage difference within states and between states, and to assess the impact of international interventions and variations in the quality of state government and local demographic factors.  We plan to draw on past donor and state reform initiatives in order to select research sites.