What determines the relative success of some regions in obtaining public goods
for their residents, while other areas within the same country lag behind? In the rest of the
paper, I review theoretical models of physical public goods provision, as well as the
empirical evidence for the channels hypothesized in this literature. Most of these focus on
the physical provision of health and education facilities. I consider two classes of
explanations: “bottom-up” explanations which focus on the ability of local communities
to successfully obtain public goods from the state, and “top-down” factors which focus
on unilateral policy interventions undertaken by committed leaders. In this sense, I
abstract away from the policymaker-provider relationship discussed in detail in the World
Development Report (2004), subsuming the provider-type decision under the second
class of factors. The analysis in this paper is purely from a positive point of view i.e.
describing which factors matter in practice, rather than an attempt to suggest specific
types of public service delivery for specific contexts.
I then consider whether similar factors can explain the variations in the quality of
public goods, highlighting some recent field experiments aimed at improving health and
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education outcomes. In the final section of the paper, I turn to the issue of whether purely
private provision of these goods can be the solution to failures of public provision.