How to Build a State

One afternoon in March 2017, Jonathan Weigel was in his office in Kananga, a large city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when he heard gunfire. He and his colleagues—a mix of local and international researchers—rushed to the veranda and peered over a wall encircling the compound. Weigel saw about a dozen teenagers sprinting down the street. They wore red, the color of a regional anti-government militia, and brandished machetes and sticks. A few minutes later, Weigel ducked as military officers ran by, spraying bullets in all directions.

Armed conflict was common in the DRC, but it had rarely reached Kananga. Soon after, two United Nations investigators were murdered just outside the city, and Weigel decided he and the other foreign researchers needed to leave. He wished the same for his Congolese colleagues, but none of them held passports. He prayed for their safety. “This is what happens all too often in fragile countries without a functional state to preserve security and promote the welfare of citizens,” he says.

At the time, he was close to finishing a PhD program in political economy and government. He’d spent 18 months in the DRC and was about to collect final results for his dissertation project: a randomized controlled trial examining how the provincial government’s property tax campaign was shaping citizens’ demand for political accountability. As his plane lifted off from Kananga, Weigel wondered if he would have to abandon the project. 

Fortunately, order was soon restored, and his team was able to return. And in the years since, Weigel has returned often to explore a critical question for some of the world’s poorest, most unstable countries: How does a fragile state build its capacity?

As one of the few research economists working in the DRC, that question has motivated Weigel’s work over the past decade. His studies, which primarily focus on taxation, are geared toward understanding how the state can mobilize resources to better serve citizens and become more accountable. From the outset, he’s collaborated with local researchers, founding a research organization that now employs 50 staffers and 110 contractors. He conducts all his studies hand in hand with the Congolese government.

“Working closely with governments is very challenging and brings a lot of uncertainty and risk,” Weigel says. “But the flip side is your research has direct policy impact at scale.”

Marina Mavungu Ngoma, who has co-authored papers and served as co-principal investigator with Weigel on many projects, says his collaborative approach is critical. “For me, it’s been truly amazing to see the trusting relationship Jonathan has built between local authorities and researchers,” says Ngoma, who grew up in the DRC. “It’s especially important in this context, where the research is not only for its own sake but also trying actively to embed capacity-building within the tax authority.”

A call to combat inequality

Weigel, who joined Haas as an assistant professor in 2021, traces his interest in international inequality to a visit from the late physician and global health pioneer Paul Farmer to his suburban Boston high school. Seeing pictures of Farmer’s work in Haiti, Weigel was shocked by the contrast with his own privileged upbringing and resolved to follow in Farmer’s footsteps.  

“What really struck me was the overwhelming humanity of his vision and the boldness of the policy solutions he fought for,” Weigel says. 

Weigel attended Harvard University in part to study with Farmer—concentrating in social studies after realizing premed involved too much blood. Following a Cambridge University fellowship, he spent two years as a research assistant for Farmer and his nonprofit, Partners In Health. Among other projects, Weigel helped deploy a cholera vaccine in Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake and collaborated with Farmer on several books. Conversations with Farmer piqued his interest in economics. “Economists have a powerful toolset to study the underlying structures of social inequality. They also have a lot of sway in the debate,” Weigel says.  

The chance to study with influential economist and political scientist James Robinson pulled Weigel back to Harvard for his doctorate. He was drawn to the DRC, a resource-rich country in which three-in-four people live in extreme poverty. “Extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated in fragile states, but very little of the research in development economics occurs in such states because it’s hard to do,” he says. “It seemed like an important gap.”

From taxation to accountability

Weigel began researching the precolonial Kuba Kingdom but soon shifted to understanding how the modern Congolese state could strengthen its ability to provide public goods—as he puts it, “How can officials build a state from scratch?” Research on the development of Europe had found that collecting taxes forced governments to become more accountable to their citizens. Weigel wanted to know whether the same effect would hold in a place where very few people were paying taxes.

He learned, through conversations with officials in the Kasaï-Central province, that they were planning a door-to-door property tax campaign. When a flyer announcing the campaign arrived at his research office in Kananga in early 2016, he saw his chance. Weigel approached tax officials to propose rolling out the tax campaign as a randomized controlled trial, and his planned three-week stay in the DRC turned into 18 months. 

The campaign, his research found, brought tax compliance from 1% to 10%. Crucially, despite the eruption of conflict, Weigel discovered that neighborhoods targeted by the campaign were also more politically engaged—attending town hall meetings and answering questionnaires. “I was amazed we still saw higher political participation in taxed neighborhoods and always thought the results were likely an underestimate” due to the conflict, he says. 

Another study investigated whether state workers or informal local leaders, known as city chiefs, were more effective at collecting property taxes. When the tax authority’s technical director first suggested deploying chiefs, Weigel was privately skeptical. Past research in Africa argued that when colonial governments asked chiefs to collect taxes, they became more despotic. But the experiment found that chiefs were significantly better collectors than state agents because they had rich local knowledge, and, if anything, collecting taxes made them more accountable to the local population.

Weigel also collaborated with the government on a randomized study of property tax rate reductions to determine which rates would maximize revenue. The experiment found that lowering tax rates increased total revenue because more people could afford to pay. The results also suggested that the rate reduction should be larger for low-value properties than for high-value ones. 

That research laid the groundwork for Weigel’s current, ongoing study—his most ambitious to date—on progressive property taxation across Kananga. The government’s records had covered less than 5% of properties in the city, so the first step was to help estimate the value of each of Kananga’s 135,000 properties. Weigel’s team flew drones over the city and used artificial intelligence to identify rooftops and calculate their surface areas. Next, they had 90 government tax collectors record the characteristics of every structure, from building materials to electricity access. Finally, they asked two expert assessors to value a random sample of 1,500 buildings. The researchers could then predict the value of every structure, creating the first complete database to use for property taxation going forward.

The last step was a randomized controlled trial to examine which tax rate system—progressive, proportional, or fixed—would maximize revenue. Preliminary results suggest that the progressive system leads to greater compliance and higher revenue. “What’s exciting is that a lot of countries like the DRC could use progressive property taxation to increase local government revenue while shifting the tax burden off the poor,” Weigel says. “It’s a win-win.” 

A collaborative approach

Weigel maintains a close relationship with the researchers employed by L’Organisation d’Etudes Economiques sur le Kasaï (ODEKA), the organization he formed in 2015. “Supporting an outstanding group of enumerators and providing consistent good employment to people I really believe in has energized me in this work since it began,” he says. All his research ideas emerge from conversations with his Congolese team and partners. 

Elie Kabue Ngindu, research manager for ODEKA who has worked with Weigel for more than a decade, says Weigel’s tenacity has sustained the research. “Jonathan is a very courageous person who does not stop when there are obstacles,” he says. “There were times when I felt that, with this or that obstacle, the research activities were going to stop, but Jonathan overcame them.” 

The work, Ngindu says, is making a difference. “Thanks to these campaigns evaluated by Jonathan’s research, the population is gradually cultivating a culture of property taxes, and that’s a good thing for our government.” 

Going forward, Weigel plans to continue researching the implications of taxation. “We always need to simultaneously study the evolution of political accountability: Is that new revenue being well spent?” he says. He’s also planning a project across the border in Zambia, where he will collaborate with a mining company to evaluate how a new copper mine shapes economic outcomes and governance. 

At Haas, Weigel says he was drawn to the Business and Public Policy Group and the university’s distinction in political economy and development economics. “The group here is really the best in the world,” Weigel says. 

He also teaches an MBA course on business ethics, where he hopes to impart a concern for social impact. “I want to get future business leaders to think really carefully about their impact and the type of leader they choose to be,” he says.