Designing for differences:aligning incentives in Tanzania’s skills sector

The aim of this paper is twofold. Building on Andreoni (2018), we first aim to evaluate the current incentive structures that cause existing inefficiencies and encourage rule-breaking behaviour. Second, we seek to test empirically a number of institutional design strategies for the sector that would better align the incentives of private- and public-sector stakeholders and […]

The aim of this paper is twofold. Building on Andreoni (2018), we first aim to evaluate the current incentive structures that cause existing inefficiencies and encourage rule-breaking behaviour. Second, we seek to test empirically a number of institutional design strategies for the sector that would better align the incentives of private- and public-sector stakeholders and thereby reduce misallocation of resources and increase employers’ compliance with tax and labour law to overcome the low-productivity trap. We hypothesise that the successful alignment of incentive structures has to take into account the different and potential
conflicting objectives of skills provision pursued by public-sector stakeholders and must also account for the heterogeneities in skills needs and capabilities of different types of productive organisations in Tanzania. We rely on in-depth stakeholder interviews and data
obtained from various government sources for the first objective. For the second objective, we conduct three Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) complemented by a comprehensive questionnaire of a sample of 209 Tanzanian establishments. This approach enables us to uncover latent preference structures differentiated by observable characteristics of the
surveyed firms.