Stuti Khemani

Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Pitfalls of participatory programs: evidence from a randomized evaluation in education in India, conducted in between September to December 2005 in India. The study observed that participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their quality. None of the interventions improved the involvement in public schools, nor did they improve the school performance. This is despite the large mobilization of volunteers. Children who attended reading camps did exhibit significant progress (children who attended were 60 percent more likely to be able to decipher letters). Therefore, providing information on education and institutions is not sufficient to improve the public schools. Funding for the study derived from Trust Fund for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development, DIME.

Decentralization and Service Delivery

Dissatisfied with centralized approaches to delivering local public services, a large number of countries are decentralizing responsibility for these services to lower-level, locally elected governments. The results have been mixed. The paper provides a framework for evaluating the benefits and costs, in terms of service delivery, of different approaches to decentralization, based on relationships of accountability between different actors in the delivery chain. Moving from a model of central provision to that of decentralization to local governments introduces a new relationship of accountability-between national and local policymakers-while altering existing relationships, such as that between citizens and elected politicians. Only by examining how these relationships change can we understand why decentralization can, and sometimes cannot, lead to better service delivery. In particular, the various instruments of decentralization-fiscal, administrative, regulatory, market, and financial-can affect the incentives facing service providers, even though they relate only to local policymakers. Likewise, and perhaps more significantly, the incentives facing local and national politicians can have a profound effect on the provision of local services. Finally, the process of implementing decentralization can be as important as the design of the system in influencing service delivery outcomes.

Democracy, public expenditures, and the poor

Countries vary systematically with respect to the incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods, and to reduce poverty. Even in developing countries that are democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents, and to private transfers that benefit a few citizens at the expense of many. These distortions can be traced to imperfections in political markets, that are greater in some countries than in others. The authors review the theory, and evidence on the impact of incomplete information of voters, the lack of credibility of political promises, and social polarization on political incentives. They argue that the effects of these imperfections are large, but that their implications are insufficiently integrated into the design of policy reforms aimed at improving the provision of public goods, and reducing poverty.

Partisan politics and intergovernmental transfers in India

Recently there has been a surge in international empirical evidence that national policymakers allocate resources across regions based on political considerations, in addition to any normative considerations of equity and efficiency. In order to mitigate these political compulsions, several federations around the world have attempted to create independent constitutional bodies that are responsible for determining federal transfers to subnational jurisdictions. The author tests whether constitutional rules indeed make a difference in curbing political influence by contrasting the impact of political variables on two types of intergovernmental transfers to states in the Indian federation over a period of time, 1972-95. The pattern of evidence shows that transfers, whose regional distribution is determined by political agents, usually provide greater resources to state governments that are politically affiliated with the national ruling party and are important in maximizing the partys representation in the national legislature. But the political effect on statutory transfers, determined by an independent agency with constitutional authority, is strikingly contrary, with greater resources going to unaffiliated state governments. The author argues that this contrasting evidence indicates that constitutional rules indeed restrict the extent to which partisan politics can affect resources available to subnational governments.

When do Legislators Pass on Pork? The Role of Political Parties in Determining Legislator Effort

A central challenge in political economy is to identify the conditions under which legislators seek to bring home the pork to constituents. We conduct the first systematic analysis of one determinant of constituency service, voter attachment to political parties, holding constant electoral and political institutions. Our analysis takes advantage of data from a unique type of public spending program that is proliferating across developing countries, the constituency development fund (CDF), which offers more precise measures of legislator effort than are common in the literature. Examining the CDF in India, we find that legislator effort is significantly lower in constituencies that are party strongholds. This result, which is robust to controls for alternate explanations, implies that legislators pass on pork when voters are more attached to political parties. It has implications not only for understanding political incentives and the dynamics of party formation, but also for evaluating the impact of CDFs.

The Politics of Partial Decentralization

Does decentralization enhance service delivery and poverty reduction? Drawing on cutting edge research, expert contributors address this fundamental question facing policy-makers in developing as well as advanced countries. This timely book builds upon insights on the recent developments in the intergovernmental literature first outlined in the Handbook of Fiscal Federalism. New empirical evidence from across the globe is presented: policy-oriented chapters evaluate fiscal federalism with an emphasis on the effectiveness of decentralized service delivery, the decentralization process in different parts of the world is appraised, and specially commissioned research focuses on the political economy process and the outcomes of the decentralization process. The role of international agencies, as explicit donors, is examined in several chapters.

Party Politics and Fiscal Discipline in a Federation: Evidence from the States of India

Theoretical and empirical analysis suggests that federations are prone to fiscal indiscipline, because of intergovernmental bargaining over the allocation of national resources. What role do political parties play in mediating this bargain? If the national government is dominated by a single political party, does the party discipline those states where its affiliates are in power? If the national government consists of a coalition of political parties, do states ruled by coalition partners bargain for higher deficits? This article provides evidence on these questions from India, a large federation in the developing world that serves as a valuable laboratory for this purpose. The authors find that those state governments that belong to the same party as that leading the national government run higher than average deficits; correspondingly, states governed by rival political parties have lower deficits, even if these parties are members of a coalition government at the center.

Can Information Campaigns Spark Local Participation and Improve Outcomes? A Study of Primary Education in Uttar Pradesh, India

There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local communities in basic service delivery can promote development outcomes. A central plank of public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of village education committees (VECs), consisting of village government leaders, parents, and teachers. The authors report findings from a survey in the state of Uttar Pradesh, of public schools, households, and VEC members, on the status of education services and the extent of community participation in the public delivery of education services. They find that parents do not know that a VEC exists, sometimes even when they are supposed to be members of it; VEC members are unaware of even key roles they are empowered to play in education services; and public participation in improving education is negligible, and correspondingly, peoples ranking of education on a list of village priorities is low. Large numbers of children in the villages have not acquired basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Yet parents, teachers, and VEC members seem not to be fully aware of the scale of the problem, and seem not to have given much thought to the role of public agencies in improving outcomes. Learning failures coexist with public apathy to improving it through public action. Can local participation be sparked through grassroots campaigns that inform communities about the VEC and its role in local service delivery? Can such local participation actually affect learning outcomes, and can any impact be sustained? The authors describe information and advocacy campaigns that have been experimentally implemented to address some of the problems with local participation, and future research plans to evaluate their impact.

Political Capture of Decentralization: Vote-Buying Through Grants-Financed Local Jurisdictions

A recent trend in decentralization in several large and diverse countries is the creation of local jurisdictions below the regional level -- municipalities, towns, and villages -- whose spending is almost exclusively financed by grants from both regional and national governments. This paper argues that such grants-financed decentralization enables politicians to target benefits to pivotal voters and organized interest groups in exchange for political support. Decentralization, in this model, is subject to political capture, facilitating vote-buying, patronage, or pork-barrel projects, at the expense of effective provision of broad public goods. There is anecdotal evidence on local politics in several large countries that is consistent with this theory. The paper explores its implications for international development programs in support of decentralization.

Political economy of infrastructure spending in India

This paper examines a puzzle in the political economy of infrastructure in India -- the co-existence of relatively low shares of capital spending in public budgets alongside evidence of large demand for village infrastructure from poor voters. It argues that this pattern is due to infrastructure projects being used at the margin for political rent-seeking, while spending on employment and welfare transfers are the preferred vehicles to win votes for re-election. New suggestive evidence on the variation of public spending composition across states, and within states over time is offered that is consistent with this argument. This evidence underscores a growing argument in the development literature that the level and composition of public spending per se may not be sufficient metrics to assess the quality of public goods policies -- greater infrastructure spending in some contexts may go to political rents rather than to the actual delivery of broad public goods for growth and poverty reduction.