Decentralization and Household Prosperity in Cameroon
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Date
2025
Authors
Fozao, Pascaline Njungoh
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
AERC
Abstract
Relating to the view that centralized governments are likely to be less sensitive to the needs of the local population than decentralized ones, we set out to investigate the impact of the 2010 decentralization on real total expenditures per adult equivalent – a proxy for household economic well-being (HEW). To do this, appeal is made to the pseudo-panel fixed effect model, with the panel constructed using age cohorts from the two most recent Cameroon household consumption surveys, and the unconditional quantile regression model of Firpo et al. (2009). Specifically, we report fixed effects regressions, correcting standard errors for within-prefecture and age-cohort correlations using the Jackknife estimator, at the mean, across colonial experiences, and the unconditional distribution. Results show that the adjusted exposure to the 2010 decentralization was associated significantly with improvements in household economic well-being (HEW) – in the order of 0.274 log points and 0.247 log points in the full and the labor force samples, respectively. A significant and positive responsiveness of HEW to decentralization is also recorded across expenditure percentiles, and the magnitude increases monotonically from the 10th to the 90th percentiles, except the dent seen among the median households. These results are, in essence, robust across samples (labor force, civil law, and common law samples), at the mean and across the distribution of real total expenditures per adult equivalent. More interestingly, the weighted exposure to the 2010 decentralization is more strongly associated with household economic well-being than the unweighted exposure. These findings are transmitted, at least in part, through improved social service delivery and associated labor market opportunities and these channels have important implications for alleviating poverty and curbing rural-urban migration in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa.