Browsing by Subject "decentralization"

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Open Access
Facilitating Development: Evidence from a National-Level Experiment on Improving Bureaucratic Performance in Myanmar
(Journal of Politics, 2023-10-01) Dulay, D; Malesky, E
Despite strong theoretical foundations, randomized evaluations demonstrate that subnational performance assessments have a mixed record in improving governance. We suggest that a key factor influencing this disappointing result has been the omission of facilitation—working with bureaucrats on how to use subnational performance assessments (SPAs) effectively and encouraging collaboration across government agencies. The argument is tested on a nationally represen-tative panel of townships in precoup Myanmar. Facilitation workshops were conducted in 20 randomly assigned townships, bringing together officials from multiple government agencies and introducing them to the results of the Myanmar Business Environment Index (MBEI), an SPA that scored a panel of 60 townships on 92 governance indicators. Results show that businesses in townships where officials attended facilitation workshops ranked their townships twice as high as the businesses in the control group. Variation in MBEI improvements was moderated by the degree of decentralization in bureaucratic agencies.
Open Access
The Impact of Recentralization on Public Services: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Abolition of Elected Councils in Vietnam
(American Political Science Review, 2014-02) Malesky, EJ; Nguyen, CV; Tran, A
Comparative political economy offers a wealth of hypotheses connecting decentralization to improved public service delivery. In recent years, influential formal and experimental work has begun to question the underlying theory and empirical analyses of previous findings. At the same time, many countries have grown dissatisfied with the results of their decentralization efforts and have begun to reverse them. Vietnam is particularly intriguing because of the unique way in which it designed its recentralization, piloting a removal of elected people's councils in 99 districts across the country and stratifying the selection by region, type of province, and urban versus rural setting. We take advantage of the opportunity provided by this quasi experiment to test the core hypotheses regarding the decision to shift administrative and fiscal authority to local governments. We find that recentralization significantly improved public service delivery in areas important to central policy-makers, especially in transportation, healthcare, and communications. Copyright © American Political Science Association 2014.