Center on Pacific Economies Research Grant Recipient
Professor Jessica Wallack
Assistant Professor of Political Economy; Research Affiliate of the California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications
Professor Wallack is at the Center for Development Finance (CDF) at the Institute for Finance and Management Research (IFMR) in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, and she will continue her work there until March 2008. Her grant is supporting the completion of a book on India’s infrastructure reforms, as well as a new project that extends her work on the political economy of infrastructure provision to look at the determinants of participation in a new forum for citizen feedback on urban public services among other questions.
The book and the urban governance project are extensions of her work on federalism, public finance, and the political economy of public services. In the past few months Professor Wallack has met with the new Indian secretary of power (the top career civil servant, one step below the minister) about pending changes in one of the central governments’ incentive programs to motivate state-level reforms, traveled with employees of a local distribution company to look at various ways they are tracking power theft, and coded and organized Parliamentary questions about electricity sector reforms.
Professor Wallack is also designing and evaluating a set of changes to a citizen feedback system to see what effect they have on citizen usage and the system’s ability to aggregate an accurate evaluation of government performance from citizen feedback.
