Abstract
Looking at the decentralized provision of public education in a middle income country, this paper estimates the impact of local autonomy on service quality, finding large heterogeneity in the effect across different levels of local development. Colombian municipalities were assigned to administer their public education service autonomously solely on the basis of whether they exceeded the 100 thousand inhabitants threshold. Exploiting this discontinuity, I estimate the impact that autonomy has had on student test scores across municipalities, using a regression discontinuity design and fixed-effects regression on a discontinuity sample. I find a test score gap arising between autonomous municipalities in the top quartile and those in the bottom quartile of the development range, in a trend that reinforces over time. From analysis of detailed municipal balance sheet data, I show that the autonomous high-developed municipalities invest in education more than the ad hoc transfers they receive, supplementing these with own financial resources.Indicators of municipal administration quality also show significant differences between the two groups of cities, helping to explain the education outcome patterns.
Highlights
Decentralization of public service provision has been at the top of policy agendas in numerous countries over the last decades, involving services such as education, health, public transport and the supply of energy, water and sewerage systems
Cities distant from the treatment cutoff are used for estimation of the regression discontinuity (RD) model28, which relies on the assumption that the population polynomial f (Pi) is able to ‘control’ for those municipal characteristics that vary with size and may confound the effect of autonomy on test scores
Columns (6) in Table 3 show the estimation of model (2), where certification status is linearly interacted with the development percentile to which each municipality belongs, as an alternative way to capture heterogeneity in the effect
Summary
Decentralization of public service provision has been at the top of policy agendas in numerous countries over the last decades, involving services such as education, health, public transport and the supply of energy, water and sewerage systems. In developing and middle-income countries, responsibilities are often handled from a central or regional level down to municipalities. In developing and middle-income countries, responsibilities are often handled from a central or regional level down to municipalities1 Such reform are expected to yield welfare benefits through better local preference matching, higher governor accountability and increases in the efficiency of service delivery. Welfare losses may instead derive from inadequate management skills of local authorities, increases in administrative and coordination costs, corruption among local bureaucrats or local elites resource capture. Welfare losses may instead derive from inadequate management skills of local authorities, increases in administrative and coordination costs, corruption among local bureaucrats or local elites resource capture3 These positive and negative repercussions may materialize in different proportions across different regions in the reforming country, giving rise or exacerbating regional inequalities. In this paper I show that entrusting Colombian municipalities with managerial autonomy over local public education has yielded heterogeneous results on local educational outcomes, depending on the level of municipal development at the time of the responsibility takeover
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
