Impact of Decentralization on Public Services in Southeast Asia Countries

The literatures on decentralization have identified the advantages of decentralization on Public Services Delivery (PSD). It generates growing debates that divided into two groups: (i) proponents of decentralization who convince that decentralization would lead to better service delivery, and (ii) opponents of decentralization that questioned the impact of decentralization on PSD.

The first group claim that local governments can better match goods to preferences, when it is closer to society, thus the local government is more likely knowing the demands of their constituents than central government (this is known as better preference-matching argument), in such situation, local government could be able to deliver services in the most efficient ways (this is known as efficiency argument).

In contrast, the opponent of the decentralization argues that decentralization may destructive to PSD for the following due to local elite behaviour that can misuse public funds more easily in the decentralized administrative and public funding. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the burgeoning literatures and empirics works concerning how decentralization has affected public service delivery in Southeast Asia countries.


Keywords: Decentralization; Public Service Delivery; Governance.
JEL Classification: H3, H4, O2, R5.