household contributions for many public goods, whereas higher negotiation, monitoring and enforcement costs can offset initial gains from increasing members from a low base.

The final set of variables captures external conditions that can either favor local goods provision or promote substitution away from these goods. Agro-ecological and climatic variables include agro-ecological zone dummies, and community medians for: slope, annual rainfall, median temperature during the growing season, and the coefficient of variation in rainfall. Community characteristics that may affect relative benefits and costs to public goods provision include (i) categories for the fraction of community members who temporarily migrate out for work, (ii) whether outsiders in-migrate to the community for temporary work, (iii) whether an agricultural extension worker resides in the community, (iv) whether telephone service is available within the community, (v) whether a micro-finance institution is located in the community, and (vi) the distance from the community to the nearest Agricultural and Development Marketing Corporation (ADMARC) outlet.<sup>15</sup> As noted above, we also have access to an administrative data set on supra-community level institutions, which we have matched with the household and community level surveys. At the EPA level, we have information on the number of farmer groups in operating in the area. Such organizations can either complement local collective action by increasing returns to local public goods provision, or they can substitute for collective action failures. At the district level, we have the number of operational donor- and government-funded agricultural development projects and the per household measures of (i) metric tons of subsidized fertilizer during the 2007/08 agricultural season, and (ii) total wages paid as part of MASAF during the 2008/09 agricultural season. As with farmer groups, directly productive inputs, social safety nets, and agricultural project resources may all either substitute or compliment local public goods provision.

Table 2 reports the descriptive statistics. The average values for median community plot maize production per hectare and median community household real annual consumption expenditures per capita stand at 1,118 and 40,774, respectively. In terms of the composition of the collective capacity index, we observe that the transportation and infrastructure domain features the greatest number of potential actions that could have been taken, followed by the education, health, agriculture and law domains. The percentages of communities that actually addressed the need for at least one local public good through collective action in the domains of transportation and infrastructure, education, health, agriculture and law were 41, 41, 27, 5 and 5 percent, respectively. The greatest degree of heterogeneity within the leadership as well as the general population, and the lowest degree of similarity between the leadership and the general population are both in terms of age. The averages for median leader age, share of female leaders and share of female members in the total membership across health committees, education committees and

> 15 ADMARC is a parastatal organization mandated to market agricultural produce and inputs. Typically at least one ADMARC outlet could be found in each district center in Malawi.

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