A model of nongovernmental organization regulation with an application to Uganda

We develop a model of regulation of service-delivery nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), where future grants are conditional on prior spending of some minimal proportion of current revenue on direct project-related expenses. Such regulation induces some NGOs to increase current project spending bu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Burger, Ronelle, Dasgupta, Indraneel, Owens, Trudy
Format: Article
Published: University of Chicago Press 2015
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/38533/
Description
Summary:We develop a model of regulation of service-delivery nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), where future grants are conditional on prior spending of some minimal proportion of current revenue on direct project-related expenses. Such regulation induces some NGOs to increase current project spending but imposes wasteful costs of compliance verification on all NGOs. Under a large class of parametric configurations, we find that regulation increases total discounted project expenditure over a regime of no regulation, when verification costs constitute no more than 15% of initial revenue. We characterize the optimal regulatory policy under these configurations. We apply our analysis to a large sample of NGOs from Uganda and find regulation to be beneficial in that context.