Does Coproduction Enhance Quality of Public Infrastructure?

Abstract

Coproduction is viewed in this paper as joint effort or cooperation between citizens and public infrastructure service providers. There is a paucity of studies on the impact of coproduction on public infrastructure quality or performance. Poor public infrastructure development poses a financial burden to many developing countries. In this paper, we use road maintenance as the example of public infrastructure. Using the Afro-barometer wave-6 dataset on Uganda, we develop the appropriate coproduction indexes as well as the road maintenance performance indexes from the survey data. Our results show that coproduction has significantly positive impacts on public road maintenance performance (RMP), which raises social welfare and economic development. Our results are robust to various model specifications and the conclusions remain valid after controlling for any potential endogenous influence or reverse causality problem that might arise. Our analysis points to the practical importance of cooperation between community and government in transport infrastructure provision such as road maintenance. It also provides practical implications for policy makers on how coproduction between community and government could be arranged.