Politics and Preschool : The Political Economy of Investment in Pre-Primary Education

Kosec, Katrina

关键词: ACCESS TO SERVICES;    AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS;    BASIC EDUCATION;    BASIC EDUCATION INVESTMENT;    BENEFITS OF INVESTMENT;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5647
RP-ID  :  WPS5647

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

What drives governments with similarrevenues to publicly provide very different amounts of goodsfor which private substitutes are available? Key examplesare education and health care. This paper compares spendingby Brazilian municipalities on pre-primary education -- agood that is also provided privately -- with spending onpublic infrastructure like parks and roads, which lacksprivate substitutes. Panel data from 1995-2008 reveal howthe distribution of income affects public investment.Revenue is endogenous to investment outcomes, and theanalysis addresses this problem by exploiting a 1998,nationwide education finance reform and several revisions tothe policy. The author constructs a variable that capturesexogenous variation in revenue generated by nonlinearitiesof the law to instrument for observed revenue.Municipalities with higher median income and more inequalityare less likely to allocate revenue to education or toexpand pre-primary enrollment. They are more likely toallocate revenue to public infrastructure. There issuggestive evidence that this occurs for two reasons,hypothesized in two separate literatures. In rich andunequal municipalities, fewer total people support publiceducation spending (the collective choice channel), andalso, any given poor person wanting public education hasless influence over policymakers there (the political power channel).