Benin – Benin’s Institutions and Development: Insights from Alternative Evaluation Approaches

This publication is part of the Benin Institutional Diagnostic.

This chapter aims to identify the institutional areas that most constrain Benin’s economic development, relying on expert opinion as it appears in databases that provide international comparisons of institutional and related indicators, or as can be gathered locally through a dedicated survey. The first section of this chapter is devoted to systematic comparisons of Benin with other countries, based on available governance-related indicators. The second section describes the survey carried out for the present study with a selected sample of decision makers in various areas and occupations. The final section synthesises the main lessons to be drawn from the preceding exercises and examines their degree of consistency with the conclusions of several growth diagnostic studies recently conducted on Benin.

Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Benin’s institutional quality in an international perspective
  • 2.1 Benchmarking Benin against neighbouring countries
  • 2.2 Benchmarking Benin against better-performing developing countries
  • 2.3 Conclusion on international comparison
• 3 A survey of experts’ opinions on Benin’s institutional quality
  • 3.1 Methodology
  • 3.2 Empirical results
  • 3.2 The main lessons from the opinion survey: summary
• 4 Institutional implications of ‘growth diagnostics’ and similar exercises
• 5 Conclusion
• References
• Appendix

Editors:

• Romain Houssa, University of Namur
• François Bourguignon, Paris School of Economics