Disponible también en formato electrónico a través de la Bibioteca del IEF.

Resumen.

Bibliografía.

The literature on decentralization has long asserted that decentralized governance increases public sector allocative efficiency. We offer an indirect test of this hypothesis by examining how decentralized governance affects revealed preferences for public goods. Specifically, we examine the
relationship between expenditure decentralization and the functional composition of public expenditures. We hypothesize that higher levels of expenditure decentralization induce agents to demand increased production of publicly provided private goods. We test this hypothesis using an unbalanced panel data set of forty-two developed and developing countries over twenty-two years. Using system Generalized Methods of Moments
and Quasi-Maximum Likelihood estimators, we find that expenditure decentralization positively, significantly, and robustly influences the share of education expenditures in consolidated government budgets. We also find evidence to suggest that expenditure decentralization positively influences
the share of health expenditures in consolidated government budgets. Decentralized governance appears to alter the composition of public expenditures toward publicly provided private goods.