Abstract:
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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.
Keywords: School outcomes, PISA, fiscal decentralization, political decentralization
JEL codes: H11, H77, I21 |