Government Fragmentation, Administrative Capacity, and Public Goods: The Negative Consequences of Reform in Burkina Faso

Abstract

Although countries throughout the developing world continue to increase their number of subnational administrative units, the consequences of administrative unit creation remain poorly understood. This paper argues that newly created administrative units face relative difficulty generating resources and staffing a full and competent bureaucracy, and as a result, are less capable of providing public goods to their constituencies. These challenges to administrative capacity are less consequential within mother units that were carved apart to create new splinter units and are entirely absent in nonsplitting units. Proxying the local provision of public goods with a measure of nighttime light intensity in Burkina Faso, the findings indicate that the public goods provision in newly created splinter provinces dropped significantly relative to prefragmentation levels, while other administrative units remained largely unaffected.

Does local government proliferation reduce maternal mortality? Evidence from Indonesian sub‐national government

“…These conditions have increased the new districts' dependency on central government resources and re-centralization of power which in turn affected the quality of maternal health care. These results confirmed the findings of previous studies on the importance of local government capacities in improving the quantity and quality of public goods and services delivery (Billing, 2019;Lewis, 2014).…”

“…In line with the above propositions, I argue that the positive consequences of local government proliferation on public policy outcomes are dependent on the local government's capacity to provide public goods and services. By local government capacity 2 I mean the ability of local governments to provide quality and quantity of local bureaucracy and gain access to resources from local taxation and central government transfers (Billing, 2019). Functionalist theories pointed out that government proliferation will redistribute not only financial resources but also bureaucratic apparatuses.…”

“…However, the promises of local government proliferation are not easy to achieve. In fact, rather than bringing better public good provisions, some evidence has suggested that the creation of new local governments may weaken the effectiveness of public goods provision in the new local government (Billing, 2019; Lewis, 2017). As has been argued by post‐functionalist theorists, the state has two contrasting objectives, namely performing its functions to provide public goods or accommodate societal and identity demands (Hooghe & Marks, 2008; Hooghe et al, 2016).…”

“…Meanwhile, due to their location on more rural/peripheral areas as well as the lack of bureaucratic experiences, new or child districts find it more difficult to generate local revenues. Additionally, a small district size may reduce the bargaining power of the local governments (particularly in new districts) to access central government resources (Billing, 2019; Lewis, 2014). Consequently, governments of new districts are more likely than those in old or parent ones to depend on central government resources for both financial and human resources.…”

“…Some studies suggest that local government proliferation has contributed to improving the nighttime light intensity and education outcomes in India (Asher & Novosad, 2015), and health outcomes such as infant and child mortality in Nigeria, Malawi, and Uganda (Grossman et al, 2017). Nevertheless, other studies have shown that local government proliferation has neither increased nighttime light intensity in Burkina Faso (Billing, 2019) nor improved education, water, and sanitation access in Indonesia (Lewis, 2017).…”