City Size, Policy Area, and Public Service Access

• In Event: New Research on Hybrid Regimes for Public Service Delivery

Abstract

According to U.N. projections, the bulk of population growth over the next two decades will occur in small and medium-sized cities in low and middle-income countries. To understand the implications of rapid urbanization in the Global South, it is therefore crucial to examine how city size affects public goods provision. While the fiscal federalism and decentralization literatures emphasize that scale economies may lead to better services in larger cities, we argue that smaller cities will provide higher rates of access to basic social and health services than larger ones. Social services like primary education and preventative health care are quick to roll out and straightforward to divide up across space, and typically do not compete with non-state providers in small cities, making them attractive means of catering to voters. Networked infrastructure services like water and electricity, in contrast, must be rolled out contiguously, and face competition from inexpensive substitutes in smaller cities, reducing political incentives for network expansion. Analyzing municipal-level data from Brazil, India, and Indonesia, we find correlational evidence in support for this argument. We illustrate the mechanisms underlying these differences across policy areas through a paired comparison of two representative cities of different sizes in Brazil.

Authors

• Alison E. Post, University of California, Berkeley

• Nicholas Kuipers, UC Berkeley