Corruption and Decentralization of Infrastructure Delivery in Developing Countries

Abstract

Corruption and targeting failures in the delivery of public services in developing countries has frequently been argued to result from absence of controls on the behavior of central bureaucrats delegated authority over their implementation.This has motivated recent initiatives towards decentralization of service procurement and delivery to elected local governments that are expected to be more accountable to user interests.However, if local democracy is prone to capture by local elites, decentralization can also be subject to diversion and targeting failures.This paper presents an analytical framework to evaluate the resulting trade-off, and predict the effects of decentralization on volume and allocation of service delivery under different financing mechanisms.