Dinner Speech - Günther Schulze: The Effect of Indonesia's Decentralization and Democratization on Local Governance and Local Public Services

Indonesia implemented  a profound decentralization reform in 2001, which was coupled with stepwise democratization  at the local level.
This lecture presents evidence on how  these reforms have affected governance and public service delivery at the local level. We study input choices, governance quality and output changes on the level of districts and seek to analyze what the relevant patterns are. In particular we seek to understand whether decentralization and democratiozation  have led to improvements in public service delivery levels overall  and whether they have affected districts in systematically different  ways. Have these reforms led to a divergence or convergence of public service levels across districts?