Information and accountability: Experimental evidence from Angola

• We study government incentives to join international transparency initiatives. • We present results from a lab experiment conducted in Angola. • We test whether subjects punish decision makers who withhold information. • Results show decision makers are not held accountable for withholding information. • This casts doubt on the demand for information presumed by transparency initiatives. Autocratic governments are typically characterized by a lack of transparency, and several international governance initiatives have been created to improve transparency on government revenues and activities. The incentives of governments to join and implement such initiatives depend, however, on the extent to which citizens hold governments accountable for withholding information. This paper presents results from a lab experiment designed to test whether subjects engage in costly punishment of decision makers who withhold information. The experiment was conducted in Angola, a resource rich country where government accountability and transparency are in general low. The results show that decision makers are not held accountable for withholding information, that this lack of accountability erodes incentives to allocate payoffs fairly, and that withholding information can be a profitable strategy for the decision maker. The experiment elucidates key mechanisms behind government incentives to remain opaque and suggests that a lack of citizen attention to the institutional setting within which economic decisions are made may permit more self-serving government behaviour and result in worse outcomes for the citizens.