Shaheen Naseer, Sultan Mehmood, Shachar Kariv, and Raymond Fisman

Naseer, S., Mehmood, S., Kariv, S. and Fisman, R. (2025) The Policy Preferences of Deputy Ministers. 12 July. Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/643e742de7c2a537d357aba0/t/68760c7c5cd11a6de84e21dd/1752566909002/SN.pdf

Policymakers balance priorities like poverty reduction, infrastructure development, healthcare, and education. We examine how nearly 1,000 high-level Pakistani officials across federal and regional governments navigate these trade-offs through a budget line experiment, allocating resources between their top two policy priorities (selected from nine) while varying the relative price of reallocation. Choices are generally consistent with maximizing a policymaking (constant elasticity of substitution) objective function. While there is considerable heterogeneity in policy prioritization—ranging from perfect complements to perfect substitutes—most subjects view their top priorities as complements rather than substitutes. Certain individual attributes predict policy preferences in largely expected ways.