Descentralización y recentralización: enseñanzas de los sectores sociales de México y Nicaragua

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) Este estudio está concebido para ayudar a los responsables a preparar y evaluar reformas institucionales de programas de educación y atención médica. Proporciona un marco analítico que puede ser usado por funcionarios públicos e investigadores, con estudios de casos específicos que ilustran una amplia gama de prácticas reales y un conjunto de lecciones aprendidas. El marco emplea el concepto de rendición de cuentas para vincular las metas amplias de reforma con las dimensiones claves de los arreglos organizacionales. Los estudios de casos específicos, basados en labor de campo en México y Nicaragua, muestran la amplia variedad de instrumentos de políticas disponibles.

Educational Infrastructure, School Construction, & Decentralization in Developing Countries: Key Issues for an Understudied Area

Poor and insufficient school infrastructure negatively impacts student learning and schooling outcomes. Myriad factors have contributed to an infrastructure gap in the education sector in many countries – rapid increases in enrolments, poor maintenance and aging capital stocks, rural to urban migration, and inefficient government planning and school construction to name a few. Various forms of decentralization are likely to be involved both to improve governance and accountability and to foster innovation and cost saving in the school construction industry and investment and project cycle. This paper first discusses why the topic is interesting and worth considering; next we lay out the issues and considerations specific to educational infrastructure decentralization; we then connect the discussion to the broader infrastructure discussions in the other papers as well as to the education decentralization literature. We examine an illustrative case study in Egypt exemplifying both the typical centralization of a national school construction authority, and the reasons for countries to consider certain kinds of decentralization. The case also highlights that school construction reforms involving potential decentralization are a long slog dominated and driven by politics. We provide a framework for un-packaging and considering key components of the processes involved in service provision and some promising strategies relating to decentralization. We conclude with some insights for practitioners and others interested in advancing knowledge of the topic

Decentralization and Recentralization: Lessons from the Social Sectors in Mexico and Nicaragua

This study is designed to help practitioners prepare and evaluate institutional reforms for education and health programs. It provides an analytic framework for use by public officials and researchers, with case studies that illustrate a wide range of actual practice, and a set of lessons learned. The framework uses the concept of accountability to link the broad goals of reform to the key dimensions of organizational arrangements. The case studies, based on fieldwork in Mexico and Nicaragua, demonstrate a wide variety of available policy instruments

Health Care Capital Financing Agencies: The Intergovernmental Roles of Quasi-Government Authorities and the Impact on the Cost of Capital

During the decade 1983-1992, approximately 1.4 trillion dollars of municipal bonds were sold in 87 thousand separate issues, primarily to finance capital projects for education, electric power, transportation, health care, housing and other public and private purpose activities. Approximately two-thirds of these financings were originated by financing authorities, quasi-government agencies which are the creation of state legislatures. Despite the growing role played by quasi-public authorities in capital finance, their impacts have not been studied systematically. We first describe the issuers of tax-exempt debt in the health sector and then derive measures for describing the mix of issuers between state and local levels, and between both government and quasi-government sectors. We present abbreviated test results of the impact that different mixes have on the cost of capital. First, competition is good: using a Herfindahl index analysis we show that states with less concentrated issuers have a lower cost of capital than those with a more concentrated market, including state-level finance monopolies. On the other hand, we cannot assert unequivocally that market deconcentration in and of itself should be a goal. For instance, there are economies of scale in the health care finance industry that allow larger (often state-level) issuers to lower the cost of capital.

Decentralization and Recentralization: Lessons from the Social Sectors in Mexico and Nicaragua

This study is designed to help practitioners prepare and evaluate institutional reforms for education and health programs. It provides an analytic framework for use by public officials and researchers, with case studies that illustrate a wide range of actual practice, and a set of lessons learned. The framework uses the concept of "accountability" to link the broad goals of reform to the key dimensions of organizational arrangements. The case studies, based on fieldwork in Mexico and Nicaragua, demonstrate a wide variety of available policy instruments

Fiscal decentralization, intergovernmental relations, and education finance: Welfare and efficiency considerations in educational expenditures and outcomes in Mexico

While the theoretical arguments for fiscal decentralization developed over the past thirty-five years have proven compelling enough for the concept to win great favor, very little empirical work has proven the merits of such policies in the forms governments have actually implemented. We examine the results of educational fiscal decentralization in a developing country with an established framework for fiscal federalism and a concomitant history of intense centralization. The structure of the flow of funds in the Mexican education sector provide an example to study: (1) the importance of the spatial distribution of outcomes resulting from expenditures rather than simply the distribution of the expenditures alone; (2) the distribution of resources to subnational political units; (3) intergovernmental relations and the resulting incentive structure for service provision, particularly with respect to fiscal transfers and grants administration; (4) the effects from decentralization efforts over the past decade, and the resulting implications for probable outcomes from efforts to decentralize; and (5) the interplay of centralized versus decentralized finance and administration. We develop methods to analyze political and socio-economic factors that affect intergovernmental fiscal allocations. The results show that (1) the Federal Government does trade some efficiency for the sake of distributional concerns in the provision of educational resources, but in doing so may discriminate against subnational jurisdictions based on factors like voting behavior or marginalized minority populations; and (2) the pattern of Federal-to-state allocations may not be replicated at the state-to-municipal level, even by Federal agencies at the state level. We also provide evidence that states may not currently be as effective educational providers as the Federal Government, raising concern for efforts to decentralize. Policy implications and recommendations resulting from Mexico\u27s experience revolve around the development of an accountable matching grant mechanism for fiscal transfers that would retain those aspects of centralized financial control beneficial to efficient and equitable service provision, while stimulating the improvements that may result from augmenting regional and local fiscal and administrative responsibilities for education

Decentralization and Recentralization: Lessons from the Social Sectors in Mexico and Nicaragua

This study is designed to help practitioners prepare and evaluate institutional reforms for education and health programs. It provides an analytic framework for use by public officials and researchers, with case studies that illustrate a wide range of actual practice, and a set of lessons learned. The framework uses the concept of "accountability" to link the broad goals of reform to the key dimensions of organizational arrangements. The case studies, based on fieldwork in Mexico and Nicaragua, demonstrate a wide variety of available policy instruments

Political Economy Research to Improve Systems of Education: Guiding Principles for the RISE Programme’s Political Economy Team (Adoption) Research Projects

This insight note presents guiding principles for the RISE Programme's Political Economy Team (Adoption) research project and reflects on the importance of having a political economy team