Municipal agricultural service delivery in the Philippines: Three empirical essays

This dissertation examines three aspects of municipal agricultural service delivery in the Philippines. The first essay investigates the effect of rural constituency share, fiscal factors, and provincial government performance on the municipal government's performance of agricultural service delivery. Random effects ordinal logit estimates suggest that for highly rural municipalities that are encumbered by resource and capacity limitations, agricultural support performance is contingent on the provincial government's performance. The second essay estimates the influence of income, political factors and neighbor-effects on agricultural spending of municipal governments in the province of Bohol. Results of the random effects estimation reveal the significant influence of income and spill-over effects from neighboring municipalities. Using social network data for participating mayors in Bohol, the third essay investigates how relative attitudes toward a prospective agricultural policy are influenced by embeddedness within the community of mayors in the province. Exact logistic estimates show that a higher betweenness centrality improves the odds that a mayor shares his peers' attitudes toward the economic benefits of organic farming promotion. The OLS estimations of policy attitude gaps reveal that a higher Bonacich centrality significantly increases the attitude disparities. Results suggest that convergence of policy attitudes necessitates the active engagement of "key actors" in policy-focused discourse. These essays depict an intriguing picture of devolved service delivery in which performance, policies and perceptions are influenced by interactions beyond local jurisdictional boundaries.