What I’ve been reading

State capacity, devolution, and why form keeps outrunning function

STATE CAPACITY

Three pieces sharing a common question: what actually produces state capacity, as distinct from the institutional forms that are supposed to carry it? Henn and Robinson show that the prior condition for Africa’s state-building deficit was deliberate preference, not inherited incapacity — which changes what solving it would require. Opalo works forward from that diagnosis toward a practical prescription. Liao provides the sharpest available image of what organisational connective tissue looks like when it actually works.

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Africa as a success story: Political organisation in pre-colonial Africa Soeren Henn & James Robinson — VoxDev / NBER Working Paper 34546 — 24 February 2026

Africa in 1884 had approximately 45,000 independent political communities against roughly 50 in Europe, not a gap in capability but a deliberate choice. Central Africans organised political life around “wealth in people” rather than territory, keeping scale small to protect community autonomy, and on their own terms this worked. The problem is that small-scale organisation optimised for internal autonomy was systematically exposed to external conquest. It was larger polities, China, Japan, Thailand, that resisted colonialism. The implication for state-building is that the prior condition blocking consolidation was rational preference, not incapacity, which is a harder thing to change.

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The mechanics of building strong states in 21st century Africa Ken Opalo — An Africanist Perspective — 3 July 2026

Opalo’s organising claim is that Africa is under-governed rather than over-governed, and that most state-building prescriptions are calibrated for the opposite problem. His prescription: form must follow realistic functions. Build on what the state can actually deliver, starting with subnational self-government and local service delivery, rather than copying institutional structures from states with different capability profiles. Brazil’s 5,570 functioning municipalities against Nigeria’s largely hollow local government areas is the comparison. Whether this resolves or simply relocates the preference for community-scale autonomy that Henn and Robinson identify depends on whether those subnational units eventually build fiscal linkages upward.

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The Organizational Party: The Real Source of China’s State Capacity Leon Liao — leonliao.substack.com — 4 July 2026

Liao’s argument is that China’s capacity derives not from bureaucratic structures or market design but from the Communist Party’s organisational depth — its ability to link people, resources, discipline, information, promotion, and tasks into a single system reaching from the centre to the village. “China’s market economy has never been only a market economy. It is a market economy deeply shaped by political organisation.” The reform era created “organised market competition” in which local governments competed for growth within party-set frameworks of cadre evaluation — liberalisation structured by political organisation, not instead of it. The piece identifies what Africa’s preference for small-scale autonomy has systematically failed to build: the connective tissue that enables implementation at scale.

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DEVOLUTION

Two pieces on the same reform mechanism producing opposite outcomes. The Brazil paper finds that municipal splits in the 1990s delivered real development gains to peripheral communities with no visible cost to the rest. Pakistan’s 18th Amendment, by contrast, devolved power from the centre but stopped at the provincial level, creating a new tier of patronage rather than reaching the citizen. The variable between them is not whether power moved downward but how far, and whether the institutions it landed in had genuine authority over the services people depend on and genuine accountability to the people receiving them.

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Decentralising development: Economic effects of government splits Ricardo Dahis & Danielle Szerman — VoxDev — June 2026

Between 1988 and 1997, Brazil went from 4,124 to 5,507 municipalities; 39% of eligible districts applied to split. Peripheral areas that broke away saw nighttime luminosity increase by roughly 40% over fifteen years; the parent headquarters gained modestly; the remaining districts showed essentially no change. The mechanism was not money alone; federal transfers rose roughly 15%, but it was decision-making autonomy over services previously controlled at a distance. The gains came from matching the scale of governance to the scope of the problem, eliminating capture, and creating accountability to citizens who had previously been peripheral.

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Pakistan’s Half-Devolution Macro Pakistani — macropakistani.substack.com — 4 July 2026

Pakistan’s 18th Amendment transferred power from Islamabad to the provinces, but local government’s share of total public spending fell from 10% in 2005 to 5% by 2024. Provinces absorbed the new resources — 82% of incremental transfers went to current expenditure — and became intermediate patronage centres; Punjab has not held local elections since 2015. Where Brazil’s splits created genuine decision-making authority at community level, Pakistan’s devolution created a new tier of resource capture between the centre and the citizen. The constitutional form changed; the function did not.

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SOUTH AFRICA

Five pieces that converge on a single structural diagnosis: the GNU has the form of shared, depoliticised governance, but the informal architecture hasn’t changed. The ANC study group piece shows that party control of the public service persists beneath the coalition’s surface. The Khaas piece on the Madlanga Commission shows what capable institutions can do, and how exceptional their doing it remains. Havemann shows the strategic and fiscal vacuum at the centre. Axelson et al. confirm that the fiscal experiments have been backfiring. And the comparator countries piece maps the distance between where South Africa is and what the institutional architecture for escape from the middle-income trap actually looks like.

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Party before country: How secretive ANC study groups undermine GNU’s work Daily Maverick — dailymaverick.co.za — April 2026

Before departments appear in front of parliamentary portfolio committees, senior officials brief ANC MPs separately in party study groups; by the time the formal committee sits, the deliberations have taken place, the reports have been approved, and the outcome, as Deputy Minister Holomisa put it, is “largely a foregone conclusion.” This predates the GNU and spans portfolios — Basic Education, Defence, and Human Settlements are all cited. The GNU’s formal architecture presupposes a depoliticised public service neutral between coalition partners; the informal architecture has not changed. The GNU has the form of a shared executive; the function remains party-controlled.

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Twelve months that changed the Republic Tebogo Khaas — khaas.substack.com — 5 July 2026

One year of the Madlanga Commission and the contrast with Parliament’s parallel ad hoc committee is the real subject. The Commission was established to investigate criminality and institutional capture in the criminal justice system. It operated with rigour and genuine consequence: careers ended, powerful figures exposed. The parliamentary committee produced procedural disorder, political grandstanding, and shielded connected witnesses. Both are formally accountable to the same constitutional order; one worked, one did not. South Africa contains genuine islands of institutional capability — the Commission, SARS at its best — but no governing orientation that could make those capabilities systemic.

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How can South Africa decisively turn the corner? Roy Havemann — havemania.substack.com — March 2026

Three growth conferences in March 2026 — ERSA, News24 On the Record, SA-TIED — produced the same finding from different audiences: the GNU has no coherent economic strategy. Raising the top income tax rate from 41% to 45% lost the fiscus R6.5 billion; the affected group’s share of personal income tax fell from 11.5% to 10.6%. Attempting to regulate 13,000 spaza shops yielded 200 registrations. These are not random errors but errors in the same direction: interventions that look like governing but subtract from the conditions for growth. Nobody in the coalition owns an agenda willing to defend specific trade-offs.

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Laffer curve confirmed for South Africa’s top earners Justin Sandefur @JustinSandefur flagging Axelson et al., forthcoming AEJ — 8 July 2026

The Axelson et al. paper confirms what Havemann’s R6.5 billion referenced: the 2017 increase from 41% to 45% placed South Africa on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. The elasticity of taxable income among top earners is estimated well above 1 (against an international consensus of 0.4), meaning the income effect outweighed the rate increase and revenue fell. Sandefur’s nuance is worth noting: avoidance and income restructuring are the more likely mechanisms, not labour supply reduction, which points to base broadening rather than rate cuts as the relevant lever. The directional finding stands regardless, and for a state with the GNU’s fiscal constraints, it is not merely an academic result.

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The Comparator Countries — Economic Growth and Development Series 1.3 Tshepo Machele (GovCompass) — nexuspolitics.substack.com — 9 July 2026

Six countries at roughly South Africa’s current stage of development — Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea, Botswana, and Poland — and what they did to escape the middle-income trap. South Korea’s R&D spending exceeds 4.5% of GDP, compared with South Africa’s 0.8%. Malaysia’s Economic Planning Unit produced 11 five-year plans with genuine implementation authority; South Africa’s National Development Plan assumed capacity the state lacked. Botswana required mineral revenues to fund investment rather than consumption; South Africa has no sovereign wealth fund. The comparator countries did not succeed because they found better diagnostic frameworks. They built their versions of the organisational connective tissue that Liao identifies in China. And that is what South Africa’s NDP assumed it could bypass.