Institutions and Service Delivery in Africa: An Overview

Institutions play a very crucial role in service delivery in Africa. The three papers in this issue explore the role of various institutions, both public and private, in delivering efficient services to promote economic growth. The first paper by Bold and Svensson is on Policies and Institutions for Effective Service Delivery: The Need of a Microeconomic and Micro-Political Approach. The authors review evidence on recent trends and outcomes in the education and health sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on the quality in service provision. The paper views low and ineffective spending on service delivery sectors as a symptom of the underlying institutional environment decay. The paper further argues that a microeconomic approach that explicitly takes political and bureaucratic incentives and constraints into account provides a fruitful, and complementary, way forward. The main finding of the paper is that innovations in the measurement of performance and ability in education and health open up ways to influence the political economic equilibrium. The second paper by Bold, Kimenyi and Sandefur looks at public and private provision of education in Kenya. The authors examine the superior examination performance of private primary schools and elite public secondary schools and test whether this performance reflects causal returns to the school type. The main finding is that, although there is a large increase in primary school enrolment following the introduction of free primary education, the increase is primarily driven by the increase in private school enrolments. The third paper by Blimpo, Harding and Wantchekon focuses on Public Investment in Infrastructure Giving Deliberations on Some Political Economy Considerations. The article constructs a unique data set to study the extent of the relationship between political marginalisation, public investment in transport infrastructure and food security in Benin, Ghana, Mali and Senegal. The main finding of the paper is that political marginalisation indirectly affects food security, via its impact on the quality of transport infrastructure. Moreover, the density of roads per square kilometre has a significant negative relationship to food insecurity. Copyright 2013 , Oxford University Press.