Revealed preferences for locally provided public goods and services: Experiments from four Thai towns

This research investigates the extent to which the fiscal decisions and choices of local public officials are representative of individual citizens' preferences with regards to collectively provided local public goods and services. The underlying hypothesis is that addressing certain structural and administrative aspects of local government such as having popularly elected local governments or increased fiscal decentralization, does not guarantee that they are necessarily effective or representative, at least with regards to individual preferences of collectively provided goods and services. Using an experimental revealed preference technique based on surveys from four small Thai municipalities, the dissertation seeks to test the conventional wisdom which says that having a local government system in place that has addressed the technocratic side of a decentralization strategy automatically instills accountability and representativeness to the fiscal preferences of the local citizens. To test this hypothesis, a carefully designed survey instrument was developed through which representative samples of respondents from the various localities were asked to reveal their preferences regarding locally provided collective goods and services. In general, the results of the surveys from the four Thai municipalities seem to confirm the hypothesis that given a choice, the overwhelming majority of respondents did not agree with the fiscal choices of local leaders in the respective municipalities.