What is best strategy to reach the Millennium Development Goal of basic education for all will depend on the specific country context.This paper introduces an input-output method to estimate the financial inputs required to achieve the MDG for primary education and an additional target of enhancing access to secondary education. 1As such the approach followed here is not new, but the innovative element is combining educational demand and supply variables considering both cost dimensions and quality of services as measured among others through test scores (outcomes), quality of school inputs and the nature of delivery of services (privatepublic, centralized or decentralized).We take the following analytical steps: (i) define a production function for specific education outputs (enrolment), (ii) isolate the main determinants of such output (considering both demand and supply factors); (iii) estimate costs per unit of producing such output, and -based on estimated elasticity's and unit costs ensuing from the education production function -(iv) calculate the financing needs of reaching key education goals.We find that determinants of access to schooling are significantly different for urban and rural and for poor and non-poor children.Furthermore, the determinants also differ when referring to access to primary or secondary education.Quality of school inputs does matter in all cases though to varying degree.Particularly, class size, shares of trained teachers and greater school autonomy (in hiring teachers and managing schools) are relevant.Quality of education outcomes, i.e. test scores, while very poor in Ecuador does not seem to influence school enrolment.The upshot is that with a more cost-effective use of resources for primary education, the MDG target of 100% of net primary school enrolment in urban areas is within reach in a period of 4 to 5 years at virtually no additional budgetary cost.Meeting the target for the rural population seems more complicated.In secondary education, important progress can be made to reach a target of 70% net enrolment (with important expected positive externalities for economic growth) by enhancing the share of trained teachers, expand coverage of school demand subsidies and improve class infrastructure.This target is within reach for the poor and non-poor urban population by 2007 at an estimated additional cost of 1 Vos is with the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague and the Free University Amsterdam.Ponce is with FLACSO-Ecuador and is also a PhD candidate at ISS.
Laura B. Rawlings, Lynne Sherburne-Benz, Julie Van Domelen
The study seeks to answer four questions that summarize the fundamental issues in the international debate about the capacity of social funds to improve beneficiaries' living conditions: o Do social funds reach poor areas and poor households? Do social funds deliver high-quality, sustainable investments? Do social funds affect living standards? How cost-efficient are social funds and the investments they finance, compared with other delivery mechanisms? The findings and lessons from this research reflect a specific moment in the evolution of six social funds and therefore may not fully predict the future impact of current investments. The evaluation assesses subprojects identified and implemented between 1993 and 1999, a period when longer-term objectives-such as increasing access to and utilization of basic services-began to supplant the funds' original emergency mandates. The time period selected allowed enough elapsed time following the implementation of the social fund subprojects to make measurement of impact and sustainability possible. The evaluation does not consider the effects of social fund projects on employment or on income generation-the original objectives of the first generation of social funds, which were introduced in Latin America. It also does not discuss the effect of social fund investments on capacity building-a more recent emphasis of social funds seeking to assist decentralization and community development.
We model the links between skills and changes in work organization. As the proportion of skilled workers increases, the economy travels through a sequence of organizational equilibria. We show that as the relative supply of skills increases the organization of work becomes more decentralized. Both skilled and unskilled workers become more autonomous and perform a wider range of tasks: decentralization spreads across firms at the expense of the old centralized organization based on a strict division of labor. Moreover, as firms switch to decentralization, their employment structure becomes more homogeneous and wage inequality stops decreasing. These predictions are compared with empirical evidence based on French establishment‐level data and we find support for both of them. This suggests that the long‐term increase in the skill level of the workforce may have been one important factor driving the recent introduction of new work practices by a large number of firms.
After the 1988 Constitution, as a consequence of an unplanned decentralization process, the increase of social expenditures by local governments has contributed to aggravate the financial situation of these governments. This aggravation poses a serious problem to the financing of social policies, thus threatening their future implementation and implying the worsening of social inequalities. This paper discusses the decentralization process of public policies and the federative equilibrium in Brazil.
The paper has two main objectives. The first is to trace the progress in the process of decentralisation in the provision of public services in India. The second is to test the hypothesis that decentralisation in the system of public service delivery in primary health care and education led to improved outcomes for the rural Indian population. Before 1992, with few exceptions, there was little movement towards decentralisation. Rural local bodies functioned primarily as program executing agents for government line departments, with little control over finances, administration, or the pattern of expenditure. The only decentralisation that existed was in the importance of state governments vis-à-vis the centre. After the 1992 Constitutional Amendments, significant progress has taken place in the form of the passing of conformity legislation by state governments, the setting up of State Finance Commissions to examine the distribution of resources from states to local bodies, and accelerated moves towards transfer of planning and expenditure responsibilities to village bodies. The paper used data from the 1994 NCAER survey to test the hypothesis that increased decentralisation/democratisation positively influences enrolment rates and child mortality once the influence of socioeconomic circumstances, civil society organisations, the problem of capture of local bodies by elite groups, and so on are controlled for. Our main empirical findings are that indicators of democratisation and public participation, such as frequency of elections, presence of non-governmental organisations, parent-teacher associations and indicator variables for decentralised states generally have the expected positive effects, although these are not always statistically indistinguishable from zero.