TY - JOUR AU - Caldeira, Emilie AU - Foucault, Martial AU - Rota-Graziosi, Grégoire TI - Does Decentralization Facilitate Access to Poverty-Related Services? Evidence from Benin JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 18118 PY - 2012 Y2 - June 2012 DO - 10.3386/w18118 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18118 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18118.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Emilie Caldeira CERDI-CNRS, Auvergne University 65 bd François Mitterrand 63000 Clermont-Ferrand France E-Mail: emiliecaldeira@gmail.com Martial Foucault CEVIPOF (Centre de recherches politiques) 98 rue de l’Université Paris 75007 France E-Mail: martial.foucault@sciencespo.fr Gregoire Rota-Graziosi CERDI, University of Auvergne 65 boulevard François Mitterand BP 320 63009 Clermont-Ferrand, Cedex 1 France Tel: 33 04 73 17 74 25 E-Mail: Gregoire.Rota_Graziosi@udamail.fr M1 - published as Emilie Caldeira, Martial Foucault, Grégoire Rota-Graziosi. "Does Decentralization Facilitate Access to Poverty-Related Services? Evidence from Benin," in Sebastian Edwards, Simon Johnson, and David N. Weil, editors, "African Successes, Volume I: Government and Institutions" University of Chicago Press (2016) M3 - presented at "African Development Successes", August 3-5, 2011 AB - We study the effect of decentralization on the access to some poverty-related public services in Benin. Compiling panel data from local governments' accounts and from surveys on 18,000 Beninese households performed in 2006 and 2007, our study suggests that decentralization has a positive overall effect on access to basic services. However, this effect appears to be nonmonotone following an inverted U-shaped curve. It varies according to local jurisdictions' wealth and to the nature of basic services. Decentralization in Benin contributes positively to the reduction of poverty by improving the average access to poverty-related services. However, the devil is in the details, as decentralization seems to increase inequality among local governments in terms of access. Another result relying on the success of decentralization in Benin is the prioritization of basic services, which differs among local governments according to their wealth. While the poorest jurisdictions neglect primary education, focusing more on access to drinking water, the richest ones get less attention to sewage services, since these are already provided at a sufficiently high level. ER -