Digitization and Governance

funded by KDI School of Public Policy and Management, Republic of Korea

With a team of seven researchers, we evaluated the impact of the PLRMIS on dispute resolution efforts in the Punjab province through the Joint Research Project of the KDI School of Public Policy, South Korea in collaboration with the Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Attock Campus, Pakistan. We adopted a quasi-experimental approach to scientifically examine the impact of PLRMIS on land-related dispute resolution and identify key issues associated with governance of this large-scale program through a field survey. Our empirical findings provide suggestive evidence of the direct effects of the program on the number of disputes registered in Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) centres across Punjab. Our results show that on average, an ADR Centre located in the early treated district is likely to receive 40 cases more than ADR centres located in early controlled districts. We also adopt a two-stage least square approach where the program effect is instrumented to estimate effect on the number of successfully resolved disputes. Our results are robust despite controlling for covariates and entity-specific variation as well as time-trend. More details, please read the complete working paper here.