Mick Moore
Biographic Data
| ID | 3616756 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mick Moore |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mick |
| FAMILY NAME | Moore |
| SIGNATURE | MOORE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3054-6114 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 775 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 77 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1959 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States
Tax obsessions: Taxpayer registration and the “informal sector” in sub‐Saharan Africa
In Memoriam: Professor Michael Lipton
The passing of Professor Michael Lipton in early April 2023, at the age of 86, marked the conclusion of a long and very distinguished career in development studies. Michael played a significant rol
Revenue-Maximising or Revenue-Sacrificing Government? Property Tax in Pakistan
The idea that states seek to maximise their revenue collection has occupied a significant place in contemporary political economy analysis of taxation, and has helped us understand the history of state formation. It is, however, very much at variance with the daily experience of tax policy and practice. Governments are frequently revenue-sacrificers: they fail to use the functioning, legitimate tax collection systems they have available to actual…
Políticas y pobreza: Trabajo de preparación para el Reporte de Desarrollo Mundial 2000/1
Revenue Reform and Statebuilding in Anglophone Africa
Globalisation and Power in Weak States
Both academic literature and popular ideas focus on the ways in which globalisation might be leading to convergence in the ways in which societies are governed. This is misleading. There are marked differentiation processes. Patterns of governance are diverging. These divergences are concentrated in smaller, poorer countries outside the ranks of the oecd and bric/emerging economies category. This article focuses on the ways in which these diverge…
Ambiguous Institutions: Traditional Governance and Local Democracy in Rural South India
In India, ‘customary village councils’ are generally believed to be disappearing vestiges of a pre-democratic, hierarchical socio-political order. However, while remaining informal and maintaining a low public profile, in Karnataka state they are actively taking on new roles, adapting to the democratic, competitive political environment, becoming more representative and pluralist, and providing a wide range of services that are highly valued by t…
Taxation and State-Building in Developing Countries: Capacity and Consent
Revenue authorities and public authority in sub-Saharan Africa
Since the early 1990s, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have established semi-autonomous revenue authorities (ARAs), organisationally distinct from ministries of finance, with some real operational autonomy, and with staff paid at rates substantially higher than those in comparable public sector jobs. This has been seen by some observers as a step to dilute the power of the central state executive. We demonstrate that this is a misreading of …
The politics and bureaucratics of rural public works: Maharashtra's employment guaranteed scheme
The Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme stands out among rural public works programmes in developing countries for its size, longevity, the generosity of its funding arrangements, and the political sophistication of its design. Its mission is highly ambitious: to supply employment flexibly and rapidly by opening and closing public works in response to local, unpredictable weather variations in a poor agrarian economy. We explore the political…
Proliferation and fragmentation: Transactions costs and the value of aid
The problem of the proliferation of the number of aid donors and aid channels continues to worsen. It is widely and plausibly believed that this significantly reduces the value of aid by increasing direct and indirect transactions costs. We contribute to the existing literature by: (a) categorising the apparent adverse effects of proliferation; (b) producing a reliable and fair indicator of the relative degree to which the main bilateral donors p…
Good Government? (Introduction)
No description available
Elites, perceptions and poverties
Elite perceptions of poverty and inequality
The researchers who have written this volume are clear not only that mass poverty is still the leading humanitarian crisis in developing countries, but that, if effective policies are to be put in place, the national elites who control governments and economies need to be convinced of both the reasons why reducing poverty is in their own and the national interest, and that public action can make a difference. Remarkably, in the rapidly growing li…
Institutionalised Co-production: Unorthodox Public Service Delivery in Challenging Environments
In developing countries in particular, services are often delivered through unorthodox organisational arrangements that cannot simply be dismissed as relics of ‘traditional ’ institutions, or as incomplete modern organisations. Some have emerged recently, and represent institutional adaptations to specific political and logistical circum-stances. We need to expand the range of organisational categories that are considered worthy of study and deve…
Taxation and the Political Agenda, North and South
Compared to their prominence in OECD countries, taxation issues appear infrequently on public political agendas in most Southern countries. The author first explores the historical and structural reasons for this difference, and then goes on to suggest why it is likely to be smaller in future: recent changes in the fiscal environment in the South will encourage a higher degree of political mobilisation around taxpayer identities, and therefore he…
Changing Paths: International Development and the New Politics of Inclusion
After two decades of marketizing, an array of national and international actors have become concerned with growing global inequality, the failure to reduce the numbers of very poor people in the world, and a perceived global backlash against international economic institutions. This new concern with poverty reduction and the political participation of excluded groups has set the stage for a new politics of inclusion within nations and in the inte…
Changing Paths: International Development and the New Politics of Inclusion
After two decades of marketizing, an array of national and international actors have become concerned with growing global inequality, the failure to reduce the numbers of very poor people in the world, and a perceived global backlash against international economic institutions. This new concern with poverty reduction and the political participation of excluded groups has set the stage for a new politics of inclusion within nations and in the inte…
Political Underdevelopment: What causes ‘bad governance’
The states of the ‘South’, although diverse, tend to be underdeveloped in the political sense: neither authoritative and effective nor legitimate and accountable to citizens. The conventional response of aid donors is institutional transfer : trying to align the institutional configurations of Southern states even more closely with those of Northern polities. This may not be the best approach. The political underdevelopment of much of the South l…
Enabling Environments: Do Anti-Poverty Programmes Mobilise the Poor
How can 'friends of the poor' in government or other agencies design and manage their anti-poverty programmes to encourage mobilisation? We explore the options, point out the advantages and disadvantages of the more direct methods, and make a case for the indirect or parametric approach: creating an enabling institutional environment, that encourages poor people, social activists and grassroots political entrepreneurs to invest in pro-poor mobili…
States, Social Policies and Globalisations Arguing on the Right Terrain
Summaries The debate about future social policies in OECD countries is framed in the light of rich country concerns, notably of a ‘welfare state at risk’. Because globalisation processes can plausibly be presented as a major source of threat, there is a temptation to generalise the analysis globally, and to assume that social policy issues in poor countries are fundamentally the same as in OECD states. The debate about the future of social policy…
Truth, trust and market transactions: What do we know
John Humphrey and Hubert Schmitz have recently made an important contribution to the literature on trust and economic transactions between firms. Unfortunately, the evidence that high levels of societal trust contribute significantly to economic growth is far less reliable than they suggest. We need more research — but research informed by greater conceptual clarity about trust and the institutional arrangements that contribute to trust. The fram…
Elite Perceptions of Poverty: Bangladesh
Summaries The Bangladeshi national elite are distanced from and unthreatened by poverty and the poor. Medium-term solutions to poverty, resting on a belief in the importance of ‘increasing awareness’ through education, rather than in direct public action, are favoured. The poor are viewed as homogeneous, and generally deserving. These benign perceptions may not accord direct anti-poverty action a high priority on the national agenda, but they als…
Between Cant and Corporatism Creating an Enabling Political Environment for the Poor
Summaries Aid and development agencies like to believe that they manage their development programmes in ways that empower the poor. This is rare in practice, even (or especially?) in the case of newly?fashionable programmes that are explicitly targeted on the poor and justified in terms of ‘empowerment’. Any attempt genuinely to use public anti?poverty programmes to encourage the autonomous, collective mobilisation (‘empowerment’) of the poor wil…
On Kinship Structure, Female Autonomy, and Demographic Behavior in India
The main states of India are broadly grouped into 2 demographic regimes. In contrast to states in the north southern states are characterized by lower marital fertility later age at marriage lower infant and child mortality and comparatively low ratios of female to male infant and child mortality. The division between the 2 regimes broadly coincides with the division areas of northern kinship/low female autonomy and southern kinship/high female a…
The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan 'Peasantry
The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the…
The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka
Dr Moore's enterprising book focuses on an apparent paradox: the failure of Sri Lanka's highly politicized smallholder electorate to place on the national political agenda issues relating to the public distribution of material resources. Sri Lanka has more than fifty years' history of pluralist democracy and such issues directly affect the interests of the smallholder population. Yet successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued economic policie…
Thoroughly Modern Revolutionaries: The JVP in Sri Lanka
The JVP (Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna-the People's Liberation Front) first came to the attention of the world outside Sri Lanka when it launched an abortive insurrection in 1971. In 1987, the JVP made another bid to come to power by force of arms. The insurrection of 1987-1989 was better-prepared and more deeply-rooted than that of 1971; the human costs and societal consequences of its extirpation were correspondingly greater. Although the JVP came …
Co-operative labour in peasant agriculture
Co-operative labour in cultivation activities exists in a wide variety of forms; two main organisational categories are distinguished and the characteristics, socio-economic correlates, and technical and economic benefits of the most important manifestations of the practice are discussed. An assessment is made of the prospects for the persistence of co-operative labour in contemporary peasant societies under the impact of certain widespread chang…
Economic Liberalization versus Political Pluralism in Sri Lanka
Is there a positive symbiosis between the liberal economy and the liberal polity? From the time the question became meaningful, mainstream Western social theory and doctrine has tended to give a positive answer. It has generally been possible convincingly to argue an intrinsic causal connection between the dispersal of economic (and thus political) power inherent in the competitive market economy and the pluralism which is central to all definiti…
Economic liberalization, political pluralism and business associations in developing countries
The fruits and fallacies of neoliberalism: The case of irrigation policy
Democracy and development in cross‐national perspective: A new look at the statistics
There is a large volume of published research on the connections between democracy and average wealth or income levels on a cross‐national basis. That work is reviewed here, and supplemented with some new statistical analysis. The review confirms the orthodox notion that there is a cross‐section statistical relationship between income levels and democracy. More important, there is strong ‐ and largely new ‐ evidence that this connection is causal…
Revenue authorities and public authority in sub-Saharan Africa
Since the early 1990s, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have established semi-autonomous revenue authorities (ARAs), organisationally distinct from ministries of finance, with some real operational autonomy, and with staff paid at rates substantially higher than those in comparable public sector jobs. This has been seen by some observers as a step to dilute the power of the central state executive. We demonstrate that this is a misreading of …
Can Foreign Aid Be Used to Promote Good Government in Developing Countries
In the five years since the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe, there has been a major shift in the way in which development aid is conceived and discussed in the aid agencies and foreign affairs ministries of the donor nations. There is a new agenda, the “ new political conditionality ” or “good government ” agenda. Formally, at least, aid increasingly is being tied to the practice of “good government ” as defined by the aid donors. Ai…
Cross‐Cultural Surveys of Peasant Family Structures: Some Comments 1
Leading the left to the right: Populist coalitions and economic reform
Mobilization and Disillusion in Rural Korea: The Saemaul Movement in Retrospect
T HE REPUBLIC OF KOREA can claim one of the most impressive economic growth records the world has ever seen.' In the three decades since the Korean War, it has been transformed from a poor, densely-populated, and resource-scarce country into a substantial industrial power, and one in which the benefits of economic growth have been widely distributed.2 Unlike Taiwan, with which it vies closely and with which it is continually compared, Korea did n…
Taxation and the Political Agenda, North and South
Compared to their prominence in OECD countries, taxation issues appear infrequently on public political agendas in most Southern countries. The author first explores the historical and structural reasons for this difference, and then goes on to suggest why it is likely to be smaller in future: recent changes in the fiscal environment in the South will encourage a higher degree of political mobilisation around taxpayer identities, and therefore he…
Declining to Learn From the East? The World Bank on ‘Governance and Developmet’
The World Bank's policy statement on good government — Governance and Development (1992) — represents the most thoughtful official contribution to the debate from the aid donors. It does not discuss good government in terms of type of political regime (e.g. multi?party competitive democracy with civil rights), as do many aid donors but deals instead with issues of government procedure and process and their implications for economic performance. A…
Sri Lankan Fishermen: Rural Capitalism and Peasant Society
Revenue Reform and Statebuilding in Anglophone Africa
Theory and reality in development: Essays in honour of Paul Streeten
Journal Article Theory and reality in development: essays in honour of Paul Streeten Get access Theory and reality in development: essays in honour of Paul Streeten. Edited by Sanjaya Lall and Frances Stewart. London: Macmillan. 1986. 291pp. Index. £30.00; ISBN 0 333 39824 6. Pb.: £9.95; ISBN 0 333 39825 4. Mick Moore Mick Moore 1Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Googl…
Elite Perceptions of Poverty: Bangladesh
Summaries The Bangladeshi national elite are distanced from and unthreatened by poverty and the poor. Medium-term solutions to poverty, resting on a belief in the importance of ‘increasing awareness’ through education, rather than in direct public action, are favoured. The poor are viewed as homogeneous, and generally deserving. These benign perceptions may not accord direct anti-poverty action a high priority on the national agenda, but they als…
Promoting Good Government by Supporting Institutional Development
Positive support to better government requires aid agencies mainly to engage in ‘institutional development’, or ‘institution building’ activities. The article discusses four sets of problems that arise for aid agencies: the fact that they are not very good at supporting institution building; the frailty of the technical assistance mechanisms available to support institution building; the threat that the newly?fashionable term ‘capacity building’ …
Between Cant and Corporatism Creating an Enabling Political Environment for the Poor
Summaries Aid and development agencies like to believe that they manage their development programmes in ways that empower the poor. This is rare in practice, even (or especially?) in the case of newly?fashionable programmes that are explicitly targeted on the poor and justified in terms of ‘empowerment’. Any attempt genuinely to use public anti?poverty programmes to encourage the autonomous, collective mobilisation (‘empowerment’) of the poor wil…
Taxation, Corruption and Reform
Corporate governance for NGOs
Official aid funding for the development NGO sector grew fast in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These halcyon days are over. Thinkers within the NGO community are concerned with how to adapt to the end of the funding boom, and to correct its adverse effects. However, in spite of many calls to reorganize, re-think, and professionalize, one major set of issues has been largely ignored: the scope for introducing collective self-regulation of the or…
The Identity of Capitalists and the Legitimacy of Capitalism: Sri Lanka since Independence
In many Asian countries, the early decades of independence after World War II were marked by tension between 'indigenous' political elites and business elites that were in large part alien, or from minority ethnic groups. This tension was one reason for the preference that most governments showed for statist and nationalist economic policies. It has abated in most cases; political and business elites now tend to pursue more co-operative strategie…
An Essay on the Foundations of our Knowledge
Regional Problems and Policies in Italy and France
Journal Article Regional Problems and Policies in Italy and France Get access Regional Problems and Policies in Italy and France. By Kevin Allen and M. C. MacLennan. London: Allen & Unwin. 1970. 352 pp. Index. (University of Glasgow Social and Economic Studies, No. 19. Gen. Ed.: D. J. Robertson.) £4.50. Mick Moore Mick Moore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, January…
Cross‐Cultural Surveys of Peasant Family Structures: Some Comments 1
The logic of interdisciplinary studies
Michael Lipton is correct that there is an important place in development studies for interdisciplinary studies. He presents however only one aspect of the case, and by the illogical rejection of an argument which, although ambiguous, leads in the right direction, he misses an important additional argument for interdisciplinary studies. There are a number of arguments for interdisciplinary studies within the social sciences; the strongest is base…
Serving the small farmer: Policy choices in Indian agriculture
Co-operative labour in peasant agriculture
Co-operative labour in cultivation activities exists in a wide variety of forms; two main organisational categories are distinguished and the characteristics, socio-economic correlates, and technical and economic benefits of the most important manifestations of the practice are discussed. An assessment is made of the prospects for the persistence of co-operative labour in contemporary peasant societies under the impact of certain widespread chang…
Agrarian Revolution Social movements and export agriculture in the underdeveloped world
The Ideological Function of Kinship: The Sinhalese and the Merina
This article compares the ideological uses of kinship among two societies, the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka and the Merina of Madagascar, arguing that kinship is not merely a reflection of social structure but also a powerful tool for shaping political and economic relations. Moore challenges the structural-functionalist view of kinship, demonstrating how kinship ideologies can be manipulated to justify existing power structures and social inequalities…
Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
On Kinship Structure, Female Autonomy, and Demographic Behavior in India
The main states of India are broadly grouped into 2 demographic regimes. In contrast to states in the north southern states are characterized by lower marital fertility later age at marriage lower infant and child mortality and comparatively low ratios of female to male infant and child mortality. The division between the 2 regimes broadly coincides with the division areas of northern kinship/low female autonomy and southern kinship/high female a…
Sri Lankan Fishermen: Rural Capitalism and Peasant Society
Categorising space: Urban‐rural or core‐periphery in Sri Lanka
The notion of a clash between distinctive urban and rural interests does not provide a convincing explanation either of the pattern of public resource allocation in Sri Lanka or of the political conflicts which underlie these allocations. The concept of a core‐periphery continuum, centred around a densely populated urban and rural region incorporating the capital city, does however furnish a useful framework for the analysis of the politics of ag…
Institutional development, the world bank, and India's new agricultural extension programme
The new World Bank‐sponsored and funded Training and Visit system of agricultural extension represents a major attempt by the Bank to promote institutional development. The very considerable investment has in fact resulted in little change or improvement in the quality of extension. The reasons lie in failure to analyse the cause of the weakness of the previous extension systems, inherent defects of the Training and Visit system, and the way in w…
Political economy and the rural‐urban divide, 1767–1981
Recent theories of urban and rural bias in Third World development are premised upon the notion of a relatively clear rural‐urban divide in terms of ecology, occupation and social and political organisation. As is the case with development economics generally, these theorists have drawn upon the societal assumptions and methodological postulates of classical political economy and of its Marxian offshoot. The concept of a clear rural‐urban divide …
Agriculture in Taiwan and South Korea: The minimalist state
The state has intervened heavily in the agricultural economies of Taiwan and South Korea, both by direct administrative means and by establishing price relativities very different from those set by market forces. Although state action has not always been effective or efficient, it has played a major role in making agriculture serve the objective of rapid industrial growth. The forms and consequences of state intervention have changed over time in…
Mobilization and Disillusion in Rural Korea: The Saemaul Movement in Retrospect
T HE REPUBLIC OF KOREA can claim one of the most impressive economic growth records the world has ever seen.' In the three decades since the Korean War, it has been transformed from a poor, densely-populated, and resource-scarce country into a substantial industrial power, and one in which the benefits of economic growth have been widely distributed.2 Unlike Taiwan, with which it vies closely and with which it is continually compared, Korea did n…
The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka
Dr Moore's enterprising book focuses on an apparent paradox: the failure of Sri Lanka's highly politicized smallholder electorate to place on the national political agenda issues relating to the public distribution of material resources. Sri Lanka has more than fifty years' history of pluralist democracy and such issues directly affect the interests of the smallholder population. Yet successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued economic policie…
On ‘the political economy of stabilization’
Critique and anti-critique: Essays on dependence and reformism
Journal Article Critique and anti-critique: essays on dependence and reformism Get access Critique and anti-critique: essays on dependence and reformism. By Andre Gunder Frank. London: Macmillan. 1984. 336 pp. Index. £20.00; ISBN 0 333 37122 4. Pb.: £7.95; ISBN 0 333 37123 2. Mick Moore Mick Moore 1Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs,…
Development and the Rural-Urban Divide
Theory and reality in development: Essays in honour of Paul Streeten
Journal Article Theory and reality in development: essays in honour of Paul Streeten Get access Theory and reality in development: essays in honour of Paul Streeten. Edited by Sanjaya Lall and Frances Stewart. London: Macmillan. 1986. 291pp. Index. £30.00; ISBN 0 333 39824 6. Pb.: £9.95; ISBN 0 333 39825 4. Mick Moore Mick Moore 1Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Googl…
Africa, Asia, and Latin America
Kachcheri Bureaucracy in Sri Lanka. The Culture and Politics of Accessibility
Interpreting Africa's Crisis: Political Science versus Political Economy
OS ll,,1/et,n. 19X7, vol IX so 4, I ntitutcot Development SIud,e. Srisex empirically-validated reconstruction of the interaction of the various factors leading to Africa's current crisis. A model of this process which ted to accurate predictions about the future -or, at least. to the construction of a narrow range of likely scenarioswould of course be much better. but perhaps a little demanding
Self-reliance versus power politics: The American and Indian experiences in building nation states
Journal Article Self-reliance versus power politics: the American and Indian experiences in building nation states Get access Self-reliance versus power politics: the American and Indian experiences in building nation states. By J. Ann Tickner. New York, Guildford: Columbia University Press. 1987. 282pp. Index. $35.00. ISBN 0 231 06272 9. Mick Moore Mick Moore 1Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex Search for other works by this …
Political science (72 works) · Economics (59 works) · Politics (45 works) · Law (43 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Development economics (31 works) · Political economy (29 works) · Economic growth (24 works) · Geography (24 works) · Law (22 works)