# **4. DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS**

The household level analysis uses information only from the household survey to construct a measure of discouraged users – the dependent variable – and household’s characteristics –the explanatory variables. In Table 4.1 we provide the distribution of households that reported to be discouraged. 38 percent of the households (640 out of the interviewed 1696) have not been discouraged in any of the 13 public agencies included in the list. Of the remaining households interviewed, 62 percent reported to be discouraged in at least one agency. Moreover, a significant share of households appears to have been discouraged in one or more agencies. In particular, 628 households were discouraged in one out of the 13 agencies, 247 households have been discouraged in two out of 13 agencies, etc. At the upper extreme, we have two households that reported to be discouraged in 10 out of 13 agencies.

<Table 4.1 around here> Table 4.2 provides the distribution of the dependent variable DIS1 –discouraged in at least one institution- by the type of public agencies included in the survey list. The lowest percentage of discouraged users appears to be in the “Secretaria Municipal de Transito” with a 3 percent of households reporting to be discouraged in this institution. At the other extreme, SUNAT shows the higher percentage of discouraged households (16.3 percent).

<Table 4.2 around here> As emphasized in the previous Sections, poor governance can impair service delivery not only limiting citizen’s accessibility to public services but also increasing the service’s costs for particular groups of citizens. We therefore explore the distribution of the incidence of discouragement by type of agency depending on the household’s characteristics. The results are summarized in Table 4.3. Households headed by a man, with medium income and with university education are the households with higher probability of being discouraged. The most interesting results come from the joint tabulation of discouragement and household income, as emphasized already in Section 2. Overall we observe that a higher proportion of low-income households is discouraged in at least one institution, compared to high-income households (61 percent compared to 59 percent)<sup>11</sup> . Thus, it appears that discouragement acts as a regressive tax for citizens in Peru.<sup>12</sup> <Table 4.3 around here> Table 4.4 provides the summary statistics for the governance variables. The variable on the honesty/dishonesty takes values from zero (household ranks all institutions as honest) to 42 (all institutions are ranked as dishonest). Only 3 percent of the surveyed households ranked all institutions as honest, and on average, households ranked as dishonest 17 public institutions out of 42. The variable Trust in State Institutions takes values from 1 (low trust in state institutions) to 7 (high trust). The average level of trust for the respondents on state institutions is 2.7 out of a 1 to 7 scale. We also include a variable that measures the knowledge that citizens have about government institutions. Sixty-six percent of the

> 11 We reject the null hypothesis of independence of the variables income and discouraged household at a significance level of 10 percent (p-value=0.099).

> 12 We define regressiveness in this context as a higher proportion of discouraged for low income households than high income households.

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