Suchergebnisse

In this paper, we study the impact of fiscal and political decentralization on the quality of public service delivery. While the effect of fiscal decentralization on public services is a recursive theme, to the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to investigate the impact of political decentralization. We use educational data as a proxy for the quality of public services. We use microdata from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores from 22 countries and test for the impact of fiscal and political decentralization on students' performance. We use not only general measures of decentralization but, for the first time, also education-specific decentralization measures. Our results indicate that the impact of fiscal decentralization on school outcomes is positive. However, the results regarding political decentralization are more ambiguous. We also observe that the scalar effect of both political and economic decentralization becomes more evident in large cities.

The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22 countries, we test whether there exists an impact of fiscal and political decentralization on student performance in the areas of mathematics, reading skills and science. We observe that fiscal decentralization exerts an unequivocal positive effect on students' outcomes in all areas, while the effect of political decentralization is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the capacity of the subnational governments to rule on its region has a positive effect on students' performance in mathematics. On the other hand, the capacity to influence the country as a whole has a negative impact on mathematics achievement. As a general result, we observe that students' performance in Mathematics is more sensible to these exogenous variations than in Sciences and reading skills.