Decentralization and the Productive Efficiency of Government: Evidence from Swiss Cantons

By I. Barankay, Ben Lockwood. Social Science Research Network, 2007

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Advocates of fiscal decentralization argue that amongst other benefits, it can increase the efficiency of delivery of government services. This paper is one of the first to evaluate this claim empirically by looking at the association between education expenditure decentralization and the productive efficiency of schools using a data-set of Swiss cantons. We first provide careful evidence that expenditure decentralization is a powerful proxy for legal local autonomy. Further panel regressions of Swiss cantons provide robust evidence that more decentralization is associated with higher educational attainment. We also show that these gains lead to no adverse effects across education types but that male students benefited more from educational decentralization closing, for the Swiss case, the gender education gap.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2888fb922215fe0eb89b0e408cef3c563fca5bd2

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Citations in the corpus

Does School Autonomy Make Sense Everywhere? Panel Estimates from PISA (2011, unknown): “Also, the two autonomy areas on personnel decisions – hiring teachers and establishing their starting salaries – are strongly related.”
Public sector efficiency: leveling the playing field between OECD countries (2008, unknown): “To our knowledge, on the empirical front, the predictions of this literature have been tested solely on the basis of local government data (e.g., Hayes et al. 1998 ;G eys2006; Balaguer-Coll et al. 2007; Barankay and Lockwood 2007; Borge et al. 2008).”
Decentralization and efficiency of local government (2010, background): “One of the few studies analyzing these links is the one by Barankay and Lockwood (2007) , who consider data on fiscal decentralization and educational inputs and outputs from Swiss cantons over the period 1982–2000.”
The Impact of Fiscal Decentralization: A Survey (2015, unknown): “For instance, Barankay and Lockwood (2007) show that the degree of decentralization is positively related to educational attainment in Switzerland; Solé-Ollé and Esteller-Moré (2005) find that the proportion of successful Spanish students in the last year of secondary education improved with decentr”
Regional Inequality and Decentralization: An Empirical Analysis (2012, unknown): “If we assume—in line with Barankay and Lockwood (2007)—that highly developed regions are closer to the effi ciency frontier, then the margin of improvement will be greater in less-developed regions.”
Decentralization and access to social services in Colombia (2009, unknown): “And Barankay and Lockwood (2007) find that greater decentralization of education to Swiss cantons is associated with higher educational attainment, especially for boys. Other recent empirical studies ask related questions about decentralization’s effects on government size, corruption, and whether i”
Fiscal decentralization and public sector efficiency: evidence from OECD countries (2013, background): “Most importantly, it fails to capture the real degree of sub-national governments’ autonomy that is to reflect the degree to which decisions regarding revenues and expenditures are truly assigned to lower levels of government (see, Ebel and Yilmaz, 2003; Stegarescu, 2005; Barankay and Lockwood, 2007”