Provision Of Local Public Goods Research Articles

There goes the neighborhood does tipping exist amongst income groups?

The ‘tipping point’ model of segregation Schelling (1971) has rarely been tested for socioeconomic variables besides race. Using US Census data from 1970 to 2010, I find evidence for tipping behavior amongst income groups. This is strongest when the population is split at the 10th percentile of income. In this case, average tipping points range from 7 to 12%. When the proportion of people below the 10th percentile in a neighborhood exceeds said tipping point, the decrease in those above the 10th percentile will be from 5 to 14%. Robustness checks indicate that these effects are not misinterpreted racial tipping points, nor a result of peoples’ income percentile changing over their lifetime. Effects are strongest in neighborhoods with more school-aged children, suggesting that income tipping is driven by concerns that the provision of local public goods could drop from an influx of lower class residents.

REGIONAL DISPARITIES, PUBLIC POLICIES AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN BRAZIL

Fiscal Federalism, the division of economic responsibilities between the central and local government, has been an ongoing debate. The few existing studies on Brazilian’s fiscal structure facing regional economic growth shows conflicting results. However fiscal decentralization can lead to a more efficient provision of local public goods and services to promote welfare state, citizen’s preferences and economic growth, Brazil's policymakers seem to have a different view. In a country where only three states in 26 hold 53% of Brazil’s PNB, disparities shows-up claiming to be solved. There are still some questions as to whether all regions can achieve real gains with greater autonomy. Decentralization may not solve all subnational entities problems, especially the issue of the poorer regions losing competitiveness about the richer regions, which increases regional disparities. In this way, more recent studies have focused on the different channels through which fiscal decentralization can affect the issue of disparities such as taxes and duties, the autonomy of spending and vertical fiscal imbalance. The present work investigates the relationship between fiscal decentralization, regional disparities and economic growth within 26 Brazilian’s states and Federal District, in the period 2001-2012. Attention was given to channels through which decentralization can affect inequality: human capital, vertical fiscal imbalance, population’s geographic concentration, and local taxes. The empirical analysis suggests that a decentralized fiscal structure can reduce regional disparities by implementing better government policies that favor local economic development.

The logic of basic education provision and public goods preferences in Chinese fiscal federalism.

Without election or re-election motivations, what factors have impacted public goods preferences in an authoritarian country such as China? More specifically, what makes political elites be devoted to or not be devoted to local public goods provision? This study, using basic education provision as an example, intends to gauge the impact of leadership selection on public goods provision in China. It is found that career trajectories of politicians have a bearing on basic education provision. The findings suggest that even under a top-down appointment system, homegrown politicians are more willing to cater to local preferences, especially on basic education provision, which suggests an extension of Riker’s theory, applied in a non-democratic regime. Numerous studies have examined the impacts of decentralization on a variety of aspects of public governance in different contexts. Nevertheless, the unique contribution of this study is its policy implication that political centralization may not be an effective solution for local public governance even in an authoritarian context.

La calidad percibida de los servicios públicos locales y la confianza institucional en México

La opinión ciudadana acerca de la provisión de bienes y servicios públicos locales reviste interés especial para la investigación sobre la confianza en las instituciones políticas. El objetivo del estudio es analizar la relación entre la calidad de los servicios públicos locales, percibida por la población, y la confianza que tiene en las instituciones. Con modelos de regresión multinivel se analizan los datos de una encuesta con representatividad estatal y nacional en México, que muestra que cuando los ciudadanos perciben calidad en los servicios públicos locales, eso influye positivamente en la confianza política. Por lo tanto, quienes confían más en las instituciones radican en las entidades federativas donde se percibe que dichos servicios son mejores. Estos resultados sugieren que en el desempeño de los gobiernos subnacionales las disparidades juegan un rol importante en la explicación de la confianza institucional.

Public Good Provision and Traditional Governance in Indigenous Communities in Oaxaca, Mexico

Can ethnically distinct communities ruled through “traditional” assemblies provide public goods and services better, than when they are ruled by leaders elected through “modern” multiparty elections? We exploit a unique institutional feature in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where municipalities are ruled by traditional governance institutions, to explore the effect of these forms of governance on the provision of public goods. Using locality-level census data, we study the provision of local public goods through a geographic discontinuity approach. We demonstrate that communities ruled by traditional governance practices offer more effective provision of local public goods than equally poor communities ruled by political parties. Relying on qualitative fieldwork and household surveys, we argue that the significant differences in the provision of public goods according to governance regime derive from community practices that solve collective action problems, enhance citizen participation in public decisions, and restrain elite capture.

Nine Indicators to Assess the Financial Issues of Local Government Administrations in Haiti

<p>The measurement of the financial issues of local public administrations has never been addressed in the scientific literature on Haiti, either from the point of view of accountability or the evaluation of local public actions. However, the provision of local public goods and services depends on the financial situation of these local public administrations. In this paper, the financial measurement model will be based on nine indicators, three for financial sustainability, three for financial flexibility and three for financial vulnerability. The results demonstrated not only the difficulties faced by municipalities in the West Department in financing their supply of local goods and services to taxpayers, but also the profound disparities in the evolution of their financial health over the period 2015–2018.</p>

The electoral migration cycle

This paper proposes a new test of Tiebout sorting that relies on the exogenous time structure of recurrent local elections. The test is based on the idea that competitive elections represent periodic perturbations to the Tiebout equilibrium of local public good provision and allocation of households to communities, so that their schedule should affect the timing of households' sorting decisions. On the other hand, internal migration flows that have nothing to do with the demand for public goods over which localities vote recurrently ought to be orthogonal to the timing of elections in a reduced-form migration equation. I exploit the staggered schedule of mayoral elections in Italy to analyze migration, elections, and public budget data across several thousands of municipalities, and find evidence of a systematic influence of the electoral calendar on the timing of sorting decisions.

A Theory of Local Public Goods Provision with Congestion: Destroy the Public Good to Produce the Public Good?

We explore the old but highly topical question of the efficient provision of public goods: could the laisser-faire lead to efficiency? Or do we need government to provide these goods? Some authors, Stiglitz (1982), Lindsay and Dougan (2013) among others, discussed some conditions under which the laisser-faire give a near optimal provision. In this paper, we consider the public goods that are subject to congestion, and basing on empirical facts in Africa, we revisit the agents' preferences regarding the use of public goods. Indeed, we could argue that the utility function does not have the same properties over its set of variation. Specifically, it may exist a threshold defining a level of public goods below which free riding is in nobody's interest. With such a utility function, we show that the laisser-faire provision amount and the social optimum coincide. At this equilibrium point, the marginal utility of the private good is higher than the marginal utility of the public good. As policy implications, the best way to incite people to voluntarily contribute to the public good provision is to destroy the public good, not the private good. In other words, any policy of eviction from public spaces may not be effective.

Planning and the So-Called ‘Sharing’ Economy / Can Shared Mobility Deliver Equity?/ The Sharing Economy and the Ongoing Dilemma about How to Plan for Informality/ Regulating Platform Economies in Cities – Disrupting the Disruption?/ Regulatory Combat? How the ‘Sharing Economy’ is Disrupting Planning Practice/ Corporatised Enforcement: Challenges of Regulating AirBnB andOther Platform Economies/ Nurturing a Generative Sharing Economy for Local

‘Sharing economy’ technology platforms now encompass housing (most prominently Airbnb); transport (from taxi-replacements Uber and Lyft to short-term rental bicycles and electric scooters); to temp...

Public Procurement versus Laissez-Faire: Evidence from Household Waste Collection

AbstractWe document that switching from laissez-faire production to public procurement in residential waste collection in Finland reduces the number of firms active in the local market, but induces a statistically significant and large decrease in unit prices on average. While public procurement, thus, seems to be desirable from the citizens’ perspective, not all municipalities adopt public procurement. We provide descriptive evidence that municipal council composition is associated with the chosen regime. This suggests that local politics may be one obstacle for the efficient provision of local public goods. (JEL codes: C23, D72, H76, L13, and L85).

Information and targeted spending

We present an electoral theory on the public provision of local public goods to an imperfectly informed electorate. We show that electoral incentives lead to greater spending if the electorate is not well informed. A more informed electorate induces candidates to target funds only to specific constituencies, which can reduce aggregate welfare.

Local fiscal policies and their impact on the number and spatial distribution of new firms

We examine the effect of local business taxation and local public good and service (PIGS) provision on the number and spatial distribution of new firms. The analysis draws on panel data for the universe of rm foundations in German municipalities, matched to municipalities' local business tax rates and the level and structure of their local PIGS provision. Methodologically, we estimate fixed effects poisson models coupled with a control function approach. The results suggest that local business taxation (PIGS provision) has a strong negative (positive) impact on the number of new firms in the policy-changing jurisdiction. Local business taxes are, moreover, found to exert beggar-thy-neighbor externalities on neigboring jurisdictions: tax reductions strongly lower the number of neighbors' rm foundations, implying that the aggregate number of new firms remains unchanged; while PIGS provision, on average, exerts no significant impact on the number of firms in adjacent jurisdictions, negative effects emerge for subsets of PIGS and firms.

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

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.

Behavioral spillovers in local public good provision: An experimental study

In a circular neighborhood, each member has a left and a right neighbor with whom(s) he interacts repeatedly. From their two separate endowment amounts individuals can contribute to each of their two structurally independent public goods, either shared only with their left, respectively right, neighbor. If most group members are discrimination averse and conditionally cooperating with their neighbors, this implies intra- as well as inter-personal spillovers which link all neighbors. Investigating individual adaptations in one’s two games with differing free-riding incentives confirms, through behavioral spillovers, that both individual contributions anchor on the local public good with the smaller free-riding incentive. Therefore asymmetry in gaining from local public goods allows to establish a higher level of voluntary cooperation.

Water, Spillovers and Free Riding: Provision of Local Public Goods in a Spatial Network

In many low-income countries, local public goods are provided by non-governmental organizations and local communities, rather than by government. In rural Tanzania, more than 500 organizations install different technologies of water pumps which local communities are then responsible for maintaining. One third of pumps are non-functional, despite low access to clean water. I show evidence that communities free ride on their neighbors' pump maintenance investments, but also benefit from spillovers that reduce the cost of maintaining their own pump. When pump maintenance spillovers are large, maintenance decisions are strategic complements, but when spillovers are small, free riding effects dominate and maintenance decisions are strategic substitutes. I develop and estimate a spatial network model of communities' pump maintenance decisions to quantify the importance of free riding and maintenance spillovers on pump functionality and child outcomes, and to estimate the effects of two policies that have been proposed in Tanzania. The model estimates that: (i) water collection fees mitigate free riding -- if adopted universally, pump functionality rates would increase by 11 percentage points; (ii) pump technology standardization across communities reduces maintenance costs -- full coordination by installing organizations would increase pump functionality by 6 percentage points; (iii) increased pump functionality improves child survival and school attendance; (iv) school attendance improves more for girls, who are primarily responsible for water collection.

Cities and Politics in the Developing World

The last 20 years have witnessed an impressive outpouring of comparative politics research examining urban politics in the developing world. This research advances our understanding of phenomena such as clientelism, law and order, and local public goods provision. Scholarship could be strengthened, however, through more careful attention to how the urban setting of this research affects the politics examined. This article proposes two distinct ways in which urban politics can be conceptualized: politics taking place in urban agglomerations, characterized by large, diverse populations settled at high densities; or politics taking place within the boundaries of city jurisdictions, possessing legal powers and responsibilities distinct from those at other tiers of government or in rural areas. Adopting either of these conceptualizations illuminates new avenues for empirical work, theoretical innovation, and improved measurement. This article also shows that recent scholarship has neglected important, and fundamentally political, topics such as urban political economy, land markets, and environmental harms. Engaging with these areas would allow political scientists to revisit classic questions regarding the institutional influences on economic growth, the politics of redistribution, and the determinants of collective action.

Provision of local public goods in mixed income communities

Motivated by the success and wide implementation of the Mixed Income Housing model in the United States and other developed countries, we provide a spatial equilibrium model of jurisdiction formation to understand how jurisdictions composed of mixed-income communities provide local public goods. Individuals choose which local public good to attend on the basis of income, and there are individuals in the same location but with different income that choose different public goods at different distances. Importantly, there is an equilibrium where smaller jurisdictions are comprised of a higher proportion of poor individuals.

The spatial spillover effect of fiscal decentralization on local public provision: Mathematical application and empirical estimation

This paper examines the spillover effect of fiscal decentralization on the provision of local public goods. The paper's objectives are as follows. First, we seek to discuss whether fiscal decentralization can affect “Promotion Tournament Game” among local governments through spillover effect of local public goods supply. Second, we also examine the intrinsic mechanism of such decentralized spillover effect. Finally, we analyze, if the spillover effect is possible, how much influence of fiscal decentralization on local public provision from both expenditure and revenue perspectives. Our analysis is based on a user fee model. The panel data from 31 Chinese provinces for the period of 1994–2013 are estimated using the spatial econometric method. The results show that revenue decentralization is negatively related to the local public provision, which is consistent with the “Leviathan hypothesis”. However, expenditure decentralization leads to an increase in the local public provision, which statistically proves the fierce competition in “Promotion Tournament Game” among Chinese governments.

Rethinking the Political Economy of Decentralization: How Elections and Parties Shape the Provision of Local Public Goods

As more and more of the world’s states devolve power and resources to sub-national governments, decentralization has emerged as one of the most important global trends of the new century. Yet, there is still no consensus as to the benefits of decentralization and how to design institutions that can realize these benefits. We investigate the political conditions under which the decentralization of authority will improve the delivery of public goods. Building off Oates’ “decentralization theorem” to include inter-jurisdictional spillovers, we develop a new theory suggesting that the interaction of democratic decentralization (the popular election of sub-national governments) and party centralization (the power of national party leaders over sub-national office-seekers) will produce the best service delivery outcomes. To test this argument empirically, we develop a new dataset of sub-national political institutions. Our analyses, which examine educational and health service delivery in 135 countries across thirty years, provide support for our theoretical expectations.

Subnational diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights from a new dataset

This paper presents a new dataset on subnational ethnolinguistic and religious diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa covering 36 countries and almost 400 first-level administrative units. We use population censuses and large-scale household surveys to compile detailed data on the ethnolinguistic composition of each region and match all reported ethnicities to Ethnologue, a comprehensive catalog of world languages. This matching allows us to standardize the notion of an ethnolinguistic group and account for relatedness between language pairs, a correlate of shared history and culture, when calculating diversity indices. Exploiting within-country variation provided by our new dataset, we find that local public goods provision, as reflected in metrics of education, health, and electricity access, is negatively related to ethnolinguistic diversity, but only if the underlying basic languages are first aggregated into larger families or if linguistic distances between groups are taken into consideration. In other words, only deep-rooted diversity, based on cleavages formed in the distant past, is strongly inversely associated with a range of regional development indicators. Furthermore, we show that subnational diversity has been remarkably persistent over the past two-three decades implying that population sorting in the short to medium run is unlikely to bias our main findings.