licenses in the lead-up to gubernatorial elections and in municipalities where the incumbent political leadership had core support.

Malawi’s political conditions reflect an environment of clientelist politics in which bureaucratic autonomy is low. O’Neil and Cammack (2014) employ the term _competitive clientelism_ to describe Malawi’s political economy, in which highly personalized political parties cohere and build support through patronage and informal relationships. These conditions produce incentives for elites to establish rules and policies which result in a high degree of discretion for the targeting of resources and services to politically useful groups. In particular, agricultural subsidies are widely recognized as having been targeted for vote-buying purposes in the years leading up to recent national elections (Chingsinga, 2009; Andrews, 2015).

Our contention is that the persistence of PTR disparities in Malawi reflect the ability of wellconnected teachers, often exploiting patronage relationships with political or appointed officials, to exert influence on the system to resist placement in remote schools where the need may be greatest, and obtain placement in schools with more amenities. The scarcity of accurate information on teacher placements and PTR disparities within the system makes it difficult to institute and enforce policies and guidelines on the allocation and reallocation of teachers which adequately target the neediest schools. Instead, policies remain broad, creating a large degree of discretion for officials; this limits their ability to resist pressure, leading to the maintenance of PTR disparities.

Second, we explore the proposition that improvements in the quality and transparency of administrative data, and increases in sharing and coordination of data between agencies, can strengthen the system to resist this political capture. By introducing accurate, up-to-date information, accepted by the key actors involved in decision-making, it is possible to define more precise and targeted policies on the distribution of teachers, moving the system from discretionbased to rules-based norms. With more precise rules, the space for discretion-based judgment is shrunk, increasing officials’ autonomy from political pressure. In addition, by helping to stimulate greater public awareness of staffing inequities, better data can catalyze communities with understaffed schools to lobby more effectively for more teachers, providing a countervailing pressure to balance teachers’ interests.

The implications of improvements in the efficiency of teacher allocation in Malawi’s schools for learning outcomes are likely to be substantial. A growing body of empirical literature suggests <u>that, within schools, teachers are central to improvements in school quality (Hanushek and Rivkin, 2006), and reduction in class sizes in certain contexts can improve students’ learning outcomes</u> (Angrist and Lavy, 1999; Woessman and West, 2006). Student test-score data for Grade 4 students collected for 12,000 children in Malawi confirms this negative association between pupil-teacherratio at Grade 4, a reasonable proxy of class size, and the test scores for English, Mathematics and Chichewa **[Figure 1]** . There is a difference of 0.2 standard deviation on IRT-scaled scores between a child enrolled in 10th percentile school, with 30 students to a teacher, compared with 90th percentile school which has 120 students to a teacher at Grade 4 level. Children with fewer teachers per pupil belong to schools located in the poorest and least developed areas with limited access to electricity, drinking water supply, access to roads and health facilities (World Bank, 2017). The uneven distribution of teachers is likely to amplify the existing disadvantages faced by poor and vulnerable children in Malawi.

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