The Distributional Consequences of State-building: Registration, Welfare, and Inequality in Ghana

• In Event: Political and Economic Inequality in Africa

Brief Overview

State-building schemes to identify and register citizens risk exacerbating inequality. Leveraging a population-based discontinuity used to allocate civil registries in Ghana, I assess effects on which, and how, citizens made claims on the state.

Author

• Jeremy Bowles, Harvard University