APEC Seminar: Pascaline Dupas-Don’t Know, Don’t Care? Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Responsive Public Services in Ethiopia

In a sample of local public officials working in Ethiopia’s decentralized bureaucracy, we document low knowledge of public priorities and substantial mismatch between citizen and government priorities. Using three experiments, we show that bureaucrats fail to update beliefs or adapt policy when provided with information about local conditions and citizen preferences for public services, and bureaucrat demand for this information is low. Mismatch between citizen and local government priorities in this setting cannot be explained by information frictions, lack of autonomy, or bureaucrat turnover. Our results challenge standard assumptions in models of fiscal federalism and highlight the limitations of decentralized bureaucracies in providing locally tailored public services without incentives or intrinsic motivation to meet public demand.