[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-112851-en":3,"doc-seo-112851-105":29,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":90},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":4,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":27,"read_time":28},112851,962075114101,"Seraphina","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/e000253a75eb197efd?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1780044092746381165",8,"Research & Report","Public Investment Choices by Local and Central Governments - kosec and mogues","This paper examines how devolving authority for public resource allocation to local governments affects service delivery in a setting with limited electoral control. Departing from classic devolution models based on functional democracy, the study builds a formal model and tests it using a natural experiment in rural Ethiopia. Spatial regression discontinuity shows decentralization strongly improves agricultural public services prioritized by the central government, while leaving drinking water services largely unchanged.","Pub lic Disclosure Authorized Pub lic Disclosure Authorized  \nThe World Bank Economic Review, 34(Supplement), 2020, S52–S57 doi: 10.1093/wber/lhz010 Supplementary Article  \nPublic Investment Choices by Local and Central Governments  \nKatrina Kosec and Tewodaj Mogues  \nAbstract  \nThis paper examines the impacts of devolving authority for public resource allocation to local governments in a setting of limited electoral control. Such a setting differs from that assumed by seminal formal models of devolution, but describes many developing countries. This study presents a formal model of this setting and tests it using unique data from a natural experiment in rural Ethiopia whereby half of the country’s regions were decentralized but not the other half. Employing a spatial regression discontinuity design, this article shows that decentralization strongly improved delivery of agricultural public services, which are of high priority to the central government. In contrast, it did not impact drinking water services, on which the central government places lower priority but citizens place high priority.  \nJEL classification: O13, H73, H4  \nKeywords: Ethiopia, local government, agriculture, water supply, regression discontinuity, public investment  \n1. Introduction  \nThe fields of public economics and political economy have provided important insights into how the provision of public goods and services by central governments contrasts with provision by local governments. However, much theoretical work on this question assumes a setting of functional democracy, and thus has only limited applications to the nondemocratic settings that characterize many developing countries.1 A high degree of electoral control leads to intergovernmental competition and citizen benchmarking of local governments’ performance against one another (Tiebout 1956; Brennan and Buchanan 1980; Besley and Case 1995; Seabright 1996; Hatfield 2015); it is through these mechanisms that decentralization leads to improved efficiency of public services and better alignment of spending with citizens’ preferences.  \nStudies of the impacts of various forms of devolution on service delivery also confront several empirical challenges: Baseline information prior to the reform is commonly unavailable; there are usually no control areas as reform is rolled out countrywide around the same time; and it is practically infeasible to conduct randomized experiments for such a large policy change. Cross-country studies face the difficulty of credibly disentangling decentralization’s impacts from those of other characteristics of the country.  \nKatrina Kosec is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), 1201 I St. NW, Washington DC 20005, USA. Tewodaj Mogues is a Senior Economist at the International Monetary Fund (this paper was written while she was a Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI). Their email addresses are, respectively, [k.kosec@cgiar.org](k.kosec@cgiar.org) [and tmogues@imf.org](and tmogues@imf.org).  \n1 Olper et al. (2014) indirectly consider this question, by analyzing the effect of transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule on public policies in agriculture.  \n© The Author(s) 2019 . Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / THE WORLD BANK.  \nAll rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [journals.permissions@oup.com](journals.permissions@oup.com)  \nDownloaded from [https://academic.oup.com/wber/article/34/Supplement_1/S52/5645046 by guest on 23 June 2021](https://academic.oup.com/wber/article/34/Supplement_1/S52/5645046 by guest on 23 June 2021)  \nAnd single-country analyses that simply measure decentralization as a continuous variable (e.g., share of own-generated revenues in local government budgets) capture something conceptually distinct from the effect of a decentralization reform. Ultimately, the issue of the impacts of decentralization is a thorny e","cbCaieaOzoeSI6Az","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaieaOzoeSI6Az","pdf",153725,1,6,"English","en",105,"# Abstract\n# 1. Introduction\n# 2. 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