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Of 51 countries that have received reward payments since 1999, six overestimated their immunization gains by a factor of four, 10 overestimated them by a factor of two, and 23 by less than two. Eight underestimated their progress.
Here is the article, interesting throughout. The bottom line is this:
Since 1986, progress in childhood immunization in the developing world has been about half that officially reported by governments in the developing world. Not only are year-to-year improvements overstated, but the total percentage of children immunized is far lower than publicly acknowledged, the study found.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 12, 2008 at 08:01 AM in Medicine | Permalink
Comments
more evidence that governments which are not held to be accountable fail to provide quality public goods to society. Welcome to political science. What's new?
Posted by: Bill at Dec 12, 2008 10:17:41 AM
Reminds me of what happened to OPEC members' oil reserves when the OPEC quota was determined to be proportional to reserves. It's interesting -- look it up.
Posted by: Neal at Dec 12, 2008 10:31:32 AM
Great coverage, keep exposing those lying bastards.
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Dec 12, 2008 10:43:11 AM
It's tricky to set up an incentive system where the recipients of the cash are the ones who measure their own progress... this is a problem in tons of areas.
One wonders why they didn't just use independent surveys as their metric, which would have been harder to game (but not necessarily impossible) ... I guess it's just cheaper to let the government tell you their progress, since they have to measure these things anyway. But then, it's not cheaper if you have to overpay, is it?!
Posted by: mk at Dec 12, 2008 12:21:56 PM
Agree with mk. This accountability problem crop up a lot. The UNFCCC wants to expand CDM carbon offsets to include building retrofits but the cost is too much to make Western-paid inspectors economical. I wonder if cellphone cams or webcams could be used to document things like a child's face and the needle injections (and carpentry work in CDM exapmple). Run the face database through facial recognition and destroy photos after immunizations complete. If Amnesty International or Oxfam runs the database there shouldn't be a problem.
What happens to the overpayments? Go to government budgets or salaries? Big difference.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan at Dec 12, 2008 1:04:01 PM
