Government Fragmentation, Administrative Capacity, and Public Goods: The Negative Consequences of Reform in Burkina Faso

Abstract

Although countries throughout the developing world continue to increase their number of subnational administrative units, the consequences of administrative unit creation remain poorly understood. This paper argues that newly created administrative units face relative difficulty generating resources and staffing a full and competent bureaucracy, and as a result, are less capable of providing public goods to their constituencies. These challenges to administrative capacity are less consequential within mother units that were carved apart to create new splinter units and are entirely absent in nonsplitting units. Proxying the local provision of public goods with a measure of nighttime light intensity in Burkina Faso, the findings indicate that the public goods provision in newly created splinter provinces dropped significantly relative to prefragmentation levels, while other administrative units remained largely unaffected.