Performance Scorecards and Government Service Delivery

Corruption and delays in government service delivery are positively correlated at the cross-country level, but it is not known if the relationship is causal in either direction. We propose a model of how the ability of bureaucrats to cause delays increases the amounts of bribes they can extract. Our experimental evaluation will measure the effect of a simple and cheap monitoring intervention aimed at reducing bureaucrats’ ability to delay service delivery. The experiment will test the hypothesis that the intervention not only increases the speed of service delivery, but also reduces bribe payments by reducing bureaucrats’ ability to delay services to citizens not paying bribes.