Decentralisation or patronage: What determines government's allocation of development spending in a unitary country? Evidence from Bangladesh

This paper contributes to the decentralisation and distributive politics literature by empirically investigating the determinants of public expenditure at the sub-national level in Bangladesh. We argue that fragmentation in a unitary developing country may not channel higher resources to local areas. Political motives may instead play a significant role in the allocation process. Using panel data methods and a novel dataset on government's district-wise allocation of annual development expenditure in Bangladesh covering the period from 2005 to 2009, the analysis focuses on the impact of local government fragmentation and tests key political distribution models (the core voter hypothesis, the swing voter hypothesis, and the political alignment theory). The results show that local government fragmentation does not have any significant impact on public spending at the district level. However, the core vote share, local elected representative's political alignment with the ruling party, and the raw number of ministers from a district are all significantly associated with higher expenditure allocation. No evidence was found in support of the swing voter hypothesis. Overall, the findings suggest that political motives matter and that the allocation of developing spending is significantly influenced by political patronage. This may be a signficant obstacle to SDGs progress, as development spending may not be governed by resource delivery mechanisms that effectively target the poor.     

Financial Liberalization and Allocation of Capital: Dark Side of the Moon

Although it is well established that financial liberalization leads to a positive ‘quantity effect’ with higher levels of investment, it remains uncertain whether it also improves the efficacy with which such investment funds are allocated. This paper contributes to this sparely researched aspect of liberalization (‘quality effect’) by carefully examining if the financial reforms in India have led to an improvement in the allocation of resources. Since one of the premises of better allocation is that funds are channelled to firms with higher marginal returns to capital (measured by Tobin’s Q), we propose three unique measures to track the efficiency of resource allocation: (a) dispersion-based measures; (b) the allocative efficiency index; and (c) the relative value of allocation. Contrary to the prevalent assumption that financial liberalization leads to higher capital allocation efficiency, this study’s findings could not establish a direct correlation between the opening up of markets and higher allocation efficiency, except for the latter part of the reform period. Further, this paper draws attention to the greater misallocation of funds in the post-reform period, as the increase in funds availability leads to excess capacity creation in some industries without consideration of the need for concurrent return or demand. The authors of this paper recommend that any financial liberalization needs to be accompanied by the setting up of institutions for corporate control, particularly in an emerging market like India.

     

Does financial liberalization improve the allocation of investment?: Micro-evidence from developing countries

Using firm level panel data from 12 developing countries we explore whether financial liberalization improves the efficiency with which investment funds are allocated. A summary index of the efficiency of investment allocation that measures whether investment funds are going to firms with a higher marginal return to capital is developed. We examine the relationship between this and various measures of financial liberalization and find that liberalization increases the efficiency with which investment funds are allocated. This holds after various robustness checks and is consistent with firm level evidence of a stronger association between investment and fundamentals after financial liberalization.     

国家自然科学基金分配中的“马太效应”及其变化分析

国家自然科学基金是我国科研基金体系中的重要组成部分,其资金分配问题一直备受关注。通过“基尼系数”这一反映贫富差距的经济学指标变化趋势,对2001-2015年国家自然科学基金分配中的“马太效应”进行了实证分析。结果表明,资助额度越高的项目,基尼系数越大,在资金分配过程中的“马太效应”越明显。国家自然科学基金中的“重点”、“杰青”项目与“面上”、“青年”项目相比,具有更明显的优势累积现象,但“青年”项目的基尼系数自2009年以来呈逐渐下降趋势,其资金分配日趋合理。最后,基于上述研究结果,对国家自然科学基金分配中“马太效应”的合理性进行了分析,并就基金的合理分配提出了相关建议。     

Risk aversion and portfolio allocation to mutual fund classes

The major factors affecting fund flows allocated to a range of mutual fund classes bearing different risk–return profiles are studied. The flexible functional form of the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) is applied to identify the major drivers of Greek investors' demand patterns for equity, bond, balanced and money market funds, given the strong growth rates of the domestic fund market and the economy's latest entry into the EMU. An increase in household expenditure is shown to have a positive impact on mutual fund flows. An adverse price impact, however, may erode budget benefits towards a fund class, as the price factor appears to be important. The cross-price effects provide insight on complementarity and substitutability among the mutual fund classes. Variations in investors' risk aversion attitudes affect demand for mutual funds and can result in asset reallocation between the asset classes. The conclusions have useful policy implications particularly to asset fund management and portfolio allocation strategies and can be compared with established mutual fund markets.     

Tactical distribution in local funding: The value of an aligned mayor

Using Chile as a case study for understanding tactical distribution under extensive controls on expenditure, this paper examines whether political motives affect the allocation of funds from the central government to localities. Collecting local-level data of two infrastructure funding programs and using the voting gap percentage between the coalition candidate and opposition competitors in a Sharp Regression Discontinuity methodology, we find causal evidence in favor of three hypotheses: (i) a coalition criterion influences the funding allocation to the local level; (ii) an electoral cycle exists in local funding; and (iii) the degree of coalition targeting varies based on a locality's history of coalition alignment. In sum, the central government regards politically aligned mayors as valuable electoral assets, especially in municipalities historically aligned with the coalition.     

What happens to social spending in IMF-supported programmes?

This article finds that education and health spending has risen during International Monetary Fund (IMF)-supported programmes at a faster pace than in developing countries as a whole. The analysis is based on the most comprehensive dataset assembled thus far for this purpose, with data covering 1985 to 2009 for 140 countries. Controlling for other determinants of education and health spending, including macroeconomic conditions, the results confirm that IMF-supported programmes have a positive and significant effect on social spending in low-income countries. Over a 5-year period with IMF-supported programmes, spending for education increases by about ¾ percentage point of Gross Domestic Product (GDP); and for health, by about 1 percentage point of GDP. IMF-supported programmes are also associated with increases in the share of government spending allocated to education and health.     

Coattails and the forces that drive them: Evidence from Mexico

Coattails and the forces behind them have important implications for the understanding of electoral processes and their outcomes. By focusing our attention on neighboring electoral sections that face the same local congressional election, but different municipal elections, and assuming that political preferences for local legislative candidates remain constant across neighboring electoral sections, we exploit variation in the strength of the municipal candidates in each of these electoral sections to estimate coattails from municipal to local congressional elections in Mexico. A one percentage increase in vote share for a municipal candidate translates, depending on his or her party, into an average of between 0.45 and 0.78 percentage point increase in vote share for the legislative candidates from the same party (though this effect may not have been sufficient to affect an outcome in any electoral district in our sample). In addition, we find that a large fraction of the effect is driven by individuals switching their vote decision in the legislative election, rather than by an increase in turnout.     

Allocation of Resources in Educational Production: The Budget Puzzle

This study examines why educational expenditures seem to be unrelated to educational achievements according to empirical evidence. An overlapping generations model of budgetary and allocation decisions is presented in a political dynamic equilibrium framework. The model's key feature is that the size of the budget is predetermined according to majority voting, taking into account the subsequent allocation decisions. Then, funds are allocated either efficiently or inefficiently on a quality–quantity frontier in hiring teachers. Under these assumptions, this study highlights the implications of existing inefficiencies and demonstrates how they might explain stylized facts. First, the majority of voters may channel more funds to an inefficient education system, in case its return to the marginal units of funding is higher, which helps explain the difficulty in finding budget effects in the data. Second, in certain circumstances, the majority of voters may actually prefer an inefficient education system. Finally, other disadvantages of inefficient education systems, in addition to low educational achievements, include high income inequality and low teacher quality in the long run.     

SOCIAL INVESTMENT IN SPAIN: HOW DO SOLIDARITY MUTUAL FUNDS DECIDE THE ALLOCATION OF SOLIDARITY FUNDING BETWEEN SOCIAL ECONOMY ORGANIZATIONS?

Solidarity mutual funds (SMFs) are a financial product oriented toward funding social economy organizations (SEOs). The main characteristic of these mutual funds, known in other countries as social investment, is that part of their management fees is allocated to support SEOs. In Spain, the criteria used in the allocation process of these funds have not been studied. The aim of this paper is to analyze the decision model of SMFs. To this end, we developed a logit regression model. The obtained results show that the decision model of SMFs promotes the development of commercial activity and favors a specific ideology and values and an exclusive relationship with the main funders.     

The impact of the two-tier plan/market system in chinese industry

There has been a great expansion in the role of the market mechanism in the distribution of industrial goods in China since the late 1970s. A two-tier system, whereby part of total production of each good is allocated by various kinds of directive plans, part by markets, has emerged. It is argued that the two-tier system has resulted in the demise of the direct role of mandatory planning in the allocation of industrial goods, and that the inherent dynamic tendencies of the system are leading to a continual increase in the share of the market over time. J. Comp. Econ., September 1987, 11(3), pp. 295–308. The World Bank, Washington, D.C. 20433.     

Lobbying,political competition and the welfare effect of campaign contribution tax

This paper develops a probabilistic voting model in which a single lobby group commits campaign contributions to parties, contingent on the policy position the party adopts. Parties may have different propensities for diverting campaign funds towards rents. We show that a party that skims more from contributions mobilises fewer uninformed voters but places more value on receiving greater contributions. Further, the contributions and vote share of the party increases with the distance between the lobby's preferred policy and the median voter's ideal policy. Finally, we show that the equilibrium policy is between the median voter's ideal point and the lobby's preferred policy. Such an equilibrium policy does not maximise the aggregate social welfare due to the distortionary nature of lobbying. However, when an appropriate contribution tax is introduced to limit this distortion, social welfare will be maximised.     

公共教育经费配置的效率差异与对策——基于中国各地区数据的经验研究

公共教育经费的配置效率是指一个地区各级次教育的经费投入对经济产出的贡献,地区之间经济发展水平不同,教育经费配置的效率也不同。基于中国各地区数据的计量表明,各地区公共教育经费的配置方向与该地区各级次教育的效率优势存在差异,东部地区的经费投入向义务教育倾斜,中西部地区则向高等教育、职业教育倾斜,而东、中、西三大区域教育效率的优势却呈现出分别向高等教育、职业教育、初等教育集中的地区差异。所以,中国公共教育经费的配置,应该考虑各级次、各地区间的教育效率差异,主要思路是:保障基础教育,优化教育经费配置的级次结构;实现教育分工,优化教育经费配置的地区级次结构;重视中部地区,提高教育经费配置的公平水平。     

Political Pressure or Rent Seeking? The Role of Mutual Funds in China's Split Share Structure Reform

In this paper, we provide further evidence on the role of mutual funds in China using the split share structure reform as an experiment. We find no supportive evidence for the political pressure hypothesis of Firth et al. (2010), but provide a set of unique results that are consistent with rent‐seeking behaviour by mutual funds. In addition, fund‐level governance can weaken the negative relationship between compensation ratio and fund ownership. Finally, we document a specific form of private benefits that can contribute to rent‐seeking behaviour by mutual funds.     

Decentralizing development: Allocating public goods via competition

Decentralizing the allocation of public goods by giving funds directly to communities takes advantage of local information concerning needs, but leaves funds open to misuse or capture by local elites. A large scale development project in Indonesia attempts to overcome this downside of decentralized allocation by having communities compete locally for block grants. Competition weeds out less efficient projects. Increasing the number of villages bidding by 10% leads to a 1.8% decline in road construction costs. Increased community participation in project planning also leads to better outcomes.     

Need,Merit and Politics in Multilateral Aid Allocation: A District‐level Analysis of World Bank Projects in India

We assess the targeting of foreign aid within recipient countries by employing Poisson estimations on the determinants of the World Bank's allocation of project aid at the district level in India. The evidence of needs‐based location choices is very weak as long as the poverty orientation of overall commitments is taken as the yardstick. It is only for some sectors that we find stronger indications of needs‐based allocation when combining sector‐specific commitments with corresponding measures of need. The evidence for a merit‐based allocation of World Bank aid is even weaker. We typically do not find evidence that aid allocation is affected by political patronage at the state or district level. However, the World Bank prefers districts where foreign direct investors may benefit from projects related to infrastructure.     

Evaluating the USFS State and Private Forestry Redesign: A first look at policy implications

Recently a shift has occurred in the way in which the United States Forest Service (USFS) distributes funds to states through its State and Private Forestry (S&PF) program. Traditionally S&PF has distributed money to states and territories formulaically. Now, under the 2008 Redesign Initiative, 15% of these funds are allocated through a competitive process. In this paper we analyze this initiative through the lens of institutional economics.Using budget, interview and survey data, we evaluate the new allocation process on the criteria of allocative efficiency, transaction costs, and distributional effects. Additionally, we examine a trade-off the Redesign Initiative faces between short-term innovations and funding programs that meet long-term USFS goals. We conclude that, while there is some positive evidence that the program is achieving some of its stated goals, it is doing so at the expense of higher transaction costs and less certain long-term projects. Moreover, we find that the lack of procedures to evaluate competitively funded projects is an important flaw that may prevent the new initiative from helping to create a high performing and adaptive governance system.     

Allocation rules for land division

This paper studies the classical land division problem formalized by Steinhaus (Econometrica 16 (1948) 101-104) in a multi-profile context. We propose a notion of an allocation rule for this setting.  We discuss several examples of rules and properties they may satisfy. Central among these properties is division independence: a parcel may be partitioned into smaller parcels, these smaller parcels allocated according to the rule, leaving a recommended allocation for the original parcel. In conjunction with two other normative properties, division independence is shown to imply the principle of utilitarianism.     

Multi-Sector Model of Tradable Emission Permits

This paper presents a multi-sector model of tradable emission permits, which includes oligopolistic and perfectly competitive industries. The firms in oligopolistic industries are assumed to exercise market power in the tradable permit market as well as in the product market. Specifically, we examine the effects of the initial permit allocation on the equilibrium outcomes, focusing on the interaction among these product and permit markets. It is shown that raising the number of initial permits allocated to one firm in an oligopolistic industry increases the output produced by that firm. Under certain conditions, raising a “clean” (less-polluting) firm’s share of the initial permits can lead to reductions in both the product and permit prices. We discuss criteria for the socially optimal allocation of initial permits, considering the trade-off between production inefficiency and consumer benefit.