5 - Delivering Schools and Clinics in Rural Senegal

Summary

This chapter employs an original, geocoded dataset of social service investments to estimate the effect of precolonial centralization on a village's likelihood of receiving a new local public good between 2002 and 2012. I find robust evidence that falling within the territory of a precolonial state increases a village’s chance of receiving local infrastructural investments from the local state. This result is robust to a number of alternative explanations and model specifications, affirming the argument that there is something different about how local governments respond to demands for and deliver these public goods in formerly centralized areas even when accounting for similar objective need. The chapter thus documents that we are witnessing the emergence of subnational variation in the spatial logics of local public goods delivery.