Resumen de Does Decentralization in the Provision of Higher Education Increase Quality of Education?

Joan Rosselló Villalonga

• In this paper we analyze to what extent devolution of responsibilities in higher education to subnational levels of government affects quality of higher education. We isolate the effects on quality of education due to the type of regime of provision of public goods from those due to mobility restrictions.

  Our results suggest that average quality of education might be higher in a decentralized regime compared to a centralized provision, under the assumption of student mobility restrictions, since decentralized provision would allow all students with high academic performance to access higher education. In case that public expenditure in higher education by regional governments was larger to that of a central government, the previous result would be reinforced. However, this comparison is undetermined as far as the central government decided to provide higher education in each region, which would occur if fixed costs were small and if the impact on quality of education of those students that would then have access to higher education was large.