Increasingly, decentralization is being adopted by countries in which assumptions made by formal models of decentralization, such as electoral accountability and population mobility, fail to hold. How does decentralization affect public service delivery in such contexts? The authors exploit the partial rollout of decentralization in the autocratic context of Ethiopia and use a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify its effects. Decentralization improves delivery of productive services, specifically, agricultural services, but has no effect on social services, specifically, drinking water services. This finding is consistent with a model in which local leaders have superior information about the public investments that will deliver the greatest returns and they are incentivized by decentralization to maximize citizens’ production—on which rents depend—rather than citizens’ utility. These findings shed light on nonelectoral mechanisms through which decentralization affects public goods provision and help to explain decentralization’s mixed effects in many nondemocratic settings.

中文翻译：

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没有民主的权力下放

越来越多的国家正在采用权力下放，在这些国家中，权力下放的正式模型所做的假设（例如选举问责制和人口流动性）无法成立。在这种情况下，权力下放如何影响公共服务的提供？作者利用埃塞俄比亚专制背景下的部分权力下放，并使用空间回归不连续性设计来确定其影响。权力下放改善了生产性服务的提供，特别是农业服务，但对社会服务，特别是饮用水服务没有影响。这一发现与一个模型相一致，在该模型中，地方领导人对将带来最大回报的公共投资拥有更丰富的信息，并且他们受到权力下放的激励，以最大限度地提高公民的生产——租金取决于——而不是公民的效用。这些发现揭示了权力下放影响公共产品提供的非选举机制，并有助于解释权力下放在许多非民主环境中的混合影响。