Publication: Participation in a School Incentive Programme in India
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Date
2009
ISSN
00220388
Published
2009
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Education policy has recently focused on improving accountability and incentives of public providers for actual learning outcomes, often with school-based reward programmes for high performers. The Learning Guarantee Programme in Karnataka, India, is prominent among such efforts, providing cash transfers to government schools that achieve learning at specified high levels. This study examines whether schools that self-selected into the incentive programme are different than those that did not. The answer has important implications for how to evaluate the impact of such a programme. Although we find no significant differences in resources and characteristics, we do find significant and substantial differences in test scores prior to selection into the programme, with better performing schools more likely to opt-in. These findings also provide insight into how incentive-based programmes that focus on levels of (rather than changes in) achievement can exacerbate inequality in education. Failing schools, since they are more likely to opt-out of incentive programmes, are likely to require other targeted programmes in order to improve. In addition, our findings reinforce the value of randomised controlled trials to evaluate incentive programmes since evaluations that rely on matching schools based on resources (if, for instance, pre-programme test scores are unavailable) will be biased if resources poorly predict test scores.
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Publication Democracy, Public Expenditures, and the Poor : Understanding Political Incentives for Providing Public Services(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2005-03-01)The incentives of politicians to provide broad public goods and reduce poverty vary across countries. Even in democracies, politicians often have incentives to divert resources to political rents and private transfers that benefit a few citizens at the expense of many. These distortions can be traced to imperfections in political markets that are greater in some countries than in others. This article reviews the theory and evidence on the impact on political incentives of incomplete information for voters, the lack of credibility of political promises, and social polarization. The analysis has implications for policy and for reforms to improve public goods provision and reduce poverty.Publication Can Information Campaigns Spark Local Participation and Improve Outcomes? A Study of Primary Education in Uttar Pradesh, India(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-07)There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local communities in basic service delivery can promote development outcomes. A central plank of public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of village education committees (VECs), consisting of village government leaders, parents, and teachers. The authors report findings from a survey in the state of Uttar Pradesh, of public schools, households, and VEC members, on the status of education services and the extent of community participation in the public delivery of education services. They find that parents do not know that a VEC exists, sometimes even when they are supposed to be members of it; VEC members are unaware of even key roles they are empowered to play in education services; and public participation in improving education is negligible, and correspondingly, people's ranking of education on a list of village priorities is low. Large numbers of children in the villages have not acquired basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Yet parents, teachers, and VEC members seem not to be fully aware of the scale of the problem, and seem not to have given much thought to the role of public agencies in improving outcomes. Learning failures coexist with public apathy to improving it through public action. Can local participation be sparked through grassroots campaigns that inform communities about the VEC and its role in local service delivery? Can such local participation actually affect learning outcomes, and can any impact be sustained? The authors describe information and advocacy campaigns that have been experimentally implemented to address some of the problems with local participation, and future research plans to evaluate their impact.Publication Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India(2010)Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their quality. We conducted a randomized evaluation of three interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation to India: providing information on existing institutions, training community members in a testing tool for children, and training volunteers to hold remedial reading camps. These interventions had no impact on community involvement, teacher effort, or learning outcomes inside the school. However, in the third intervention, youth volunteered to teach camps, and children who attended substantially improved their reading skills. This suggests that citizens face constraints in influencing public services.Publication Federal Politics and Budget Deficits : Evidence from the States of India(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-10)This paper tests two predictions implied by models of the common-pool game in federations where subnational governments are more likely to have higher deficits because they do not internalize the macroeconomic effects of fiscal profligacy. The first is that subnational governments that belong to the same political party as the central government have lower spending and deficits because they are more likely to be influenced to internalize the macroeconomic effects of additional local spending; and the second is that subnational governments that are more dependent on intergovernmental transfers have higher spending and deficits. We find that in 15 major states of India over the period 1972-1995, states in fact have substantially higher spending and deficits (higher by about 10 percent of the sample average) when their government belongs to the same party as that governing at the center; and that intergovernmental grants tend to have a counter-intuitive negative effect on spending and deficits. The additional deficit of affiliated states is financed almost entirely by additional loans from the central government (as opposed to the market) leading to our interpretation that similar political considerations influence the distribution of deficits across states as they do other intergovernmental grants. We argue that the evidence from India, contrasted with broader international evidence, indicates that the effect of fiscal institutions in a federation is sensitive to underlying political incentives. This underscores the overall importance of political institutions in determining the consolidated government deficit, relative to specific rules of intergovernmental transfers.Publication Pitfalls of Participatory Programs : Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-03)Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes community members, specifically locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools, into committees and gives these powers over resource allocation, monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey this paper finds that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. The paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. The authors find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools. However, the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it.
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