Ninth Annual Conference on Management of the Pakistan Economy Human Capital Development for Sustained Economic Growth/ Patronage in Rural Punjab: Evidence from a New Household Survey Dataset

Abstract

The intervention of local elites is often cited as an impediment to policy implementation in many developing countries. In this paper we present a newly collected household data set from Punjab, Pakistan, which can be used to analyze how patron-client relationships affect which households get access to state-provided goods and services. We find that: (i) households report receiving active assistance both from local officials and provincial and national politicians in accessing state services and on a range of other measures, (ii) vulnerable households, such as landless and female-headed households, appear less likely to receive assistance from patrons, suggesting that patronage activity could increase inequality of outcomes, (iii) shared ‘biraderi’, or clan based kinship, between the patron and client is not associated with an increased likelihood of reported assistance from patrons, (iv) local officials and politicians tended to recommend candidates in the last election and rural households were strongly convinced that the patron knew for whom they had cast their votes for in the last election, and (v) clients from rural households meet local officials most frequently and politicians least frequently.