Title: Essays on the political economy of public good provision in developing countries
Description: This dissertation consists of three essays on the political economy of public good provision in Ghana and India. The first chapter takes a macro approach and looks at the effect of the creation of a government institution on restraining the prevalence of patronage in resource allocation for public good provision. The second and third chapters present micro studies on the relationship between population heterogeneity and access to public goods. The tenuous correctness of the assumptions of fiscal federalism in developing countries calls into question a blanket application of its prescribed roles of various levels of government. The micro-level empirical analyses in these chapters reveal patterns that can be informative about the mechanisms by which population heterogeneity influences public goods provision in such areas. The first chapter presents an empirical investigation of Ghana's District Assemblies Common Fund, a centrally managed formula-based system of transfer of funds to local bodies responsible for development. I find that the tendency for the program to allocate and disburse a greater per capita amount to districts that voted for the ruling government declines over time. Calculated counterfactual allocations suggest some political manipulation in the determination of the formula and there is a persistent election cycle in the magnitude of annual disbursements. However, a possible mode of channeling more funds to an area through the creation of smaller districts is not prominently exploited.

The second chapter focuses on a comparison of the relationship between social divisions and access to public goods in rural Ghana before and after the government institution investigated in chapter one. The evidence shows that the intervention which made large amounts of funds automatically available to local government reduces the role of population heterogeneity in access to public goods. In the third chapter, I present an empirical analysis similar to that in Chapter two using data from villages in the neighboring northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. I find that more homogeneous populations tend to have better access to public goods in the education sector. However, some public goods may have been transformed to club goods and so are positively correlated with population heterogeneity.