Jean-Philippe Platteau
Biographic Data
| ID | 520084 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jean-Philippe Platteau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jean-Philippe |
| FAMILY NAME | Platteau |
| SIGNATURE | PLATTEAU J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Namur |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6650-9390 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 737 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
What we have learned since Rostow
Political Liberalization and State Capture by Business Interests
Behind the Veil of Cultural Persistence: Marriage and Divorce in a Migrant Community
Arranged marriage with a spouse chosen in the country of origin is a persisting practice in many migrant communities. In this context, rather than being imposed by migrant parents on children, an arranged marriage is the outcome of a negotiation between them. Parents see this type of marriage as a vector of transmission of their identity to the next generation. Children resist because they are concerned about mutual compatibility with their futur…
Is the Bangladesh Paradox Sustainable?: The Institutional Diagnostic Project
Bangladesh is widely seen as a 'paradox'. Over the last quarter of a century, it has maintained economic growth and has outperformed many countries on social indicators while scoring very low on the quality of governance. Moreover, its economic progress does not seem to indicate significant improvement in comparative institutional indicators. Is the Bangladesh Paradox Sustainable? thus examines whether such a paradoxical combination can be sustai…
Aid Allocation with Optimal Monitoring: Theory and Policy
Aid allocation with optimal monitoring: Theory and policy
Institutional Challenges at the Early Stages of Development: Lessons from a Multi-Country Study
Despite strong interest in the role of institutions; methods of operation, underlying political forces and their precise nature are still misunderstood. Partial analysis of specific aspects of public interventions simplified historical examples, or rough cross-country relationships tend to be the main guides to policy recommendations. Along with four in-depth country studies, published in companion volumes, Institutional Challenges at the Early S…
State Capture and Rent-Seeking in Benin: The Institutional Diagnostic Project
Benin is a small, slow-growing economy whose development relies on two sources of rent that are controlled by self-centred elites: cotton export and illegal cross-border trade with Nigeria. Patrimonialism governs Beninese society as a forceful struggle for political power takes place between the oligarchs who control these sources and use them as formidable levers of power. State Capture and Rent-Seeking in Benin argues that this struggle causes …
The Quran and the Sword
This paper elucidates the willingness of an autocrat to push through institutional reforms in a context where traditional authorities represented by religious clerics are averse to them and where the military control the means of repression and can potentially stage a coup. We show that although the autocrat always wants to co-opt the military, this is not necessarily true of the clerics. Exclusive co-option of the military obtains where the loya…
Introduction to the special issue “Towards understanding changes in Women’s status: The economic approach at work”
Are women emancipating? Evidence from marriage, divorce and remarriage in Rural Northern Burkina Faso☆
Cognitive bias in insurance: Evidence from a health scheme in India
Buy as you need: Nutrition and food storage imperfections
Should a Poverty-Averse Donor Always Reward Better Governance? A Paradox of Aid Allocation
This article revisits the inter-country aid allocation by a donor who must distribute a given aid amount and is sensitive to needs and governance considerations. Against conventional wisdom, if the donor has strong enough aversion to poverty, the share of a country whose governance has improved is reduced. Yet, the poor will still be better off. These results continue to hold when aid effectiveness depends on intrinsic governance and the volume o…
Experimental approaches in development and poverty alleviation
Risk as Impediment to Privatization? The Role of Collective Fields in Extended Agricultural Households
As in the case of cooperatives, collective fields in extended agricultural households act as an insurance device but entail inefficiencies arising from the incentives to free ride on coworkers’ efforts. Privatization provides good incentives but decreases the level of risk sharing. The classical analysis of this trade-off rules out another major risk-sharing mechanism, namely income transfers. This paper is a first attempt to merge the two insura…
Towards Gender Equity in Development
As a result of widespread mistreatment and overt discrimination in all dimensions of their lives, women lack significant autonomy. The central preoccupation of this book is to explore key sources of female empowerment and discuss the current challenges and opportunities for the future. Schematically, three main domains are distinguished. The first is marriage and women?s relative bargaining position within the household. Since in developing count…
Optimal management of transfers: An odd paradox
Islam Instrumentalized: Religion and Politics in Historical Perspective
In this book, economist Jean-Philippe Platteau addresses the question: does Islam, the religion of Muslims, bear some responsibility for a lack of economic development in the countries in which it dominates? In his nuanced approach, Platteau challenges the widespread view that the doctrine of Islam is reactionary in the sense that it defends tradition against modernity and individual freedom. He also questions the view that fusion between religio…
Does Aid Availability Affect Effectiveness in Reducing Poverty? A Review Article
This paper addresses the impact of aid supply on aid effectiveness. First, we review theoretical literature that deals with the problem of governance in donor–recipient relationships and are susceptible of highlighting effects of aggregate aid availability. Second, we provide a conceptual framework that explicitly incorporates a trade-off between considerations of needs and governance. We examine the impact of aid supply on the manner in which a …
The Demand for Microinsurance: A Literature Review
Religious co-option in autocracy: A theory inspired by history
Productive inefficiency in extended agricultural households: Evidence from Mali
Religion, Culture, and Development
The Hard Challenge of Aid Coordination
Aid coordination is a constant theme of discussion among national and international aid agencies in their search for more effectiveness and efficiency in delivering development assistance. This paper seeks to clarify some of the arguments currently made in support of aid coordination, and to precise unavoidable trade-offs born of the existence of political costs. It is anchored in the available literature on aid delivery while focusing on the imp…
Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is There a Role for Rural Communities?
This book focuses on the efficient and equitable management of local or village-level natural resources. It is divided into two parts. Part 1 provides an in-depth analysis on the optimal use of natural resources. It dwells on the “tragedy of the commons”, which attributes inefficient resource use to the absence of well-defined property rights. Non-cooperative game theory is used to examine the impact of human interactions on resource management, …
Land tenure security and investment incentives: Puzzling evidence from Burkina Faso
The Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights as Applied to Sub-Saharan Africa: A Critical Assessment
The evolutionary theory of land rights can be considered the dominant framework of analysis used by mainstream economists to assess the land tenure situation in developing countries, and to make predictions about its evolution. A central tenet of this theoryis that under the joint impact of increasing population pressure and market integration, land rights spontaneously evolve towards rising individualization and that this evolutioneventually lea…
The Ambiguous Impact of Inequality on Local Resource Management
Monitoring Elite Capture in Community-Driven Development
Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to improving ways of assessing the effectiveness of development interventions. This is to be welcomed, especially with regard to community-based or participatory aid projects, since considerable resources are currently being earmarked for these by almost all types of donor agencies, including large international organizations. Such projects are vulnerable to elite capture at local level, and this problem…
The Risk of Resource Misappropriation in Community-Driven Development
Using the law to change the custom
A framework for the analysis of evolving patron-client ties in agrarian economies
Penetration of Capitalism and Persistence of Small-scale Organizational Forms in Third World Fisheries
Political Instrumentalization of Islam and the Risk of Obscurantist Deadlock
The Distributive Impact of Land Markets in Uganda
This article presents first‐hand evidence about land distribution and the impact of land markets in central Uganda. This area is characterized by unequal distribution of land inheritance, rural‐rural migration, and active land markets. We show that land markets, and particularly land purchases, tend to reduce the initial inequality in the initial (inherited) distribution of land. Land purchases by landless farmers in their native village represen…
The Hard Challenge of Aid Coordination
Aid coordination is a constant theme of discussion among national and international aid agencies in their search for more effectiveness and efficiency in delivering development assistance. This paper seeks to clarify some of the arguments currently made in support of aid coordination, and to precise unavoidable trade-offs born of the existence of political costs. It is anchored in the available literature on aid delivery while focusing on the imp…
Elite capture through information distortion: A theoretical essay
Productive inefficiency in extended agricultural households: Evidence from Mali
Coordination problems in local-level resource management
The Dynamics of Fisheries Development in Developing Countries: A General Overview
Experimental approaches in development and poverty alleviation
Religious co-option in autocracy: A theory inspired by history
The Drive Towards Mechanization of SmallScale Fisheries in Kerala: A Study of the Transformation Process of Traditional Village Societies
Formal Law as a Magnet to Reform Custom
The question of the role of statutory law in social environments permeated by custom and traditional norms is particularly important when the statutory law aims to correct social inequalities embedded in the customs. The conventional view is that formal law often fails to take root in custom-driven societies, especially when the formal law conflicts with custom. We present a simple analytical model with elite members and commoners as contendants …
Inheritance patterns in migration-prone communities of the Peruvian Highlands
Le développement décentralisé, stratégie de réduction de la pauvreté
et de quelque manire que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord pralable et crit de l'diteur, en dehors des cas prvus par la lgislation en vigueur en France. Il est prcis que son stockage dans une base de donnes est galement interdit
The Perverse Effects of High Brideprices
Heterogeneity, social esteem and feasibility of collective action
The Effect of Land Scarcity on Farm Structure: Empirical Evidence from Mali
We analyze the individualization of farm units in Mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields. Since a moral-hazard-in-team problem plagues production on the latter and the household head extracts his income from it, he faces a trade-off between efficiency and capture. We show, within the framework of a patriarchal farm household model, that private plots …
Classical economics and agrarian reforms in underdeveloped areas: The radical views of the two mills
This paper considers the ideas of James and John Stuart Mill regarding the agrarian problems of the underdeveloped areas. The broad significance of these ideas is discussed in a first section. In the central section, the way the two Mills analyse and attempt to solve the agrarian issue in backward regions is carefully examined and contrasted with the standard approach of most of their contemporary colleagues. Connections between production relati…
Projet Cooperatif et Realite Rurale Dans le Tiers‐Monde
Malthus et le sous-développement ou le problème de la cohérence d'une théorie
Platteau Jean-Philippe. Malthus et le sous-développement ou le problème de la cohérence d'une théorie. In: Revue économique, volume 35, n°4, 1984. pp. 635-666
The Drive Towards Mechanization of SmallScale Fisheries in Kerala: A Study of the Transformation Process of Traditional Village Societies
Towards a Generalized Concept of Peripheral Politics. A Review of A. Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary — 1825–1945
An inquiry into quasi‐credit contracts: The role of reciprocal credit and interlinked deals in small‐scale fishing communities
In agrarian village societies beset with many hazards and uncertainties, people evolve various means of coping with risk. What is perhaps less known is that credit transactions can sometimes serve the function of reducing risk in such societies. This article is concerned with examining several insurance‐motivated credit arrangements in small‐scale fishing communities. A hunger insurance mechanism of ‘reciprocal credit’ and a system of interlinked…
Penetration of Capitalism and Persistence of Small-scale Organizational Forms in Third World Fisheries
The Dynamics of Fisheries Development in Developing Countries: A General Overview
Share contracts and their rationale: Lessons from marine fishing
Most of the existing literature on share contracts is based explicitly or implicitly on agriculture, a sector in which share contracts are seldom dominant and apparently on the decline. Moreover, since agricultural activities have some rather special characteristics, the purpose of the present article is to analyse contractual choice and especially the choice of share contracts in a sector in which share contracts are dominant, namely fishing. In…
Are Economists Concerned With Power
While till recently economists were essentially concerned with analysing the (free) play of market forces and their consequences, thus leaving power outside their field of investigation, the same cannot be said of a host of recent contributions based on the concept of strategic rationality. However, the latter approaches still follow an abstract mode of analysis and thereby tend to focus on the mechanisms whereby power is exerted and reproduced a…
Behind the market stage where real societies exist ‐ part II: The role of moral norms
This two‐part article is an attempt to clarify the social conditions upon which the viability and efficiency of the market system rest. It strives to show that the ‘embeddedness’ thesis, that is, an explanation based upon the existence of long‐run personal ties involving the use of reputation mechanisms among transactors, cannot fully elucidate the question as to how the problem of trust is solved in market societies. As explained in Part I, ther…
A framework for the analysis of evolving patron-client ties in agrarian economies
The Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights as Applied to Sub-Saharan Africa: A Critical Assessment
The evolutionary theory of land rights can be considered the dominant framework of analysis used by mainstream economists to assess the land tenure situation in developing countries, and to make predictions about its evolution. A central tenet of this theoryis that under the joint impact of increasing population pressure and market integration, land rights spontaneously evolve towards rising individualization and that this evolutioneventually lea…
Mutual insurance as an elusive concept in traditional rural communities
During the last two decades, economists have paid increasing attention to the role of informal risk‐sharing arrangements as a privileged way through which traditional rural communities can achieve a significant degree of protection against income fluctuations and other hazards beyond their control. This article however argues that when they enter into such arrangements members of these communities are guided by a principle of balanced reciprocity…
The social conditions of the market: A rejoinder
Coordination problems in local-level resource management
Strategic Processes in Monsoon Asia's Economic Development
The countries of monsoon Asia - whose economies traditionally depend on rice cultivation - experience unique problems in economic development because of their weather. Typically, heavy rains come during one half of the year, while the other half remains relatively dry. This places unusual demands on the work-force, which can be fully employed while the land is wet for rice cultivation but must seek other employment during the rest of the year. Th…
Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in the Malthusian trap
The Ambiguous Impact of Inequality on Local Resource Management
Some Concluding Reflections on the Privatization of Common Property Resources
This chapter presents some conclusions on the privatisation of common property resources. It argues that the property rights school confuses property regimes in which a resource is free for the taking, with other regimes where access to, and the use of resources are subject to strong internal regulations. More scientific thinking is needed to refine the different arguments on the impact of a particular property regime on the nature and forms of i…
The Property Rights School Solution: The Privatization Programme
This chapter discusses the property rights school solution, which advocates the development of private property rights in a resource. It argues that private property rights do not necessarily promote efficiency due to the absence of markets for certain resources, and imperfect markets. The impact of a privatization programme on income distribution is examined.
The Unregulated Common Property: The Prisoner's Dilemma Revisited
This chapter analyses the pessimistic view implied by the ‘tragedy of commons’, that uncoordinated human behaviour leads to the destruction of the commons. It identifies the limitations of Ronald Coase’s theory that agents may get involved in voluntary exchanges of their rights to impose externalities on the others. The possibility of spontaneous cooperative behaviour in a strategic framework is examined based on recent developments in non-cooper…
Conditions for Successful Collective Action: Insights from Field Experiences
This chapter analyses the conditions for successful collective action in the local level management of common property resources (CPRs). It discusses the problem of economic incentives, the twin issues of group size and homogeneity, the rationale and characteristics of the sanction system, and the role of tradition.
Natural Resources and Economic Growth: Towards a Definition of Sustainability
This chapter presents a rationale for a conservationist policy, but argues against the preservation of all renewable natural resources. Production becomes more sensitive to resource degradation the more fragile the resource base. When conservation investments are less effective, the adoption of shut-down practices will be optimal for resource users, and the lower long-run (steady-state) stock of the resources becomes even under conservation pract…
Recent Changes Affecting Collective Action at Village Level
This chapter examines the impact of economic and social environment changes on collective action in village societies with respect to the management of common property resources (CPRs). It is divided into two sections. The first section draws lessons from the centralized approach to environmental management followed by governments in the Third World. In the second section, it is argued that village arrangements for solving problems of access to, …
Economics (61 works) · Political science (51 works) · Law (34 works) · Business (28 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Microeconomics (22 works) · Geography (20 works) · Land Rights and Reforms (19 works) · Philosophy (14 works)