Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/62501 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6722
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22 countries, we test whether there exists an impact of fiscal and political decentralization on student performance in the areas of mathematics, reading skills and science. We observe that fiscal decentralization exerts an unequivocal positive effect on students' outcomes in all areas, while the effect of political decentralization is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the capacity of the subnational governments to rule on its region has a positive effect on students' performance in mathematics. On the other hand, the capacity to influence the country as a whole has a negative impact on mathematics achievement. As a general result, we observe that students' performance in Mathematics is more sensible to these exogenous variations than in Sciences and reading skills.
Subjects: 
school outcomes
PISA
fiscal decentralization
political decentralization
JEL: 
H11
H77
I21
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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