Indonesian Intergovernmental Performance Grants: an Empirical Assessment of Impact

The government of Indonesia has now piloted two different output-based performance grants to regions. One focuses on increasing the amount and quality of local government capital spending. The other provides incentives for local governments to augment equity investments in their water enterprises and for the enterprises to use those investments to increase the number of household water connections to the poor. Impact evaluations of the two grants suggest some reasonably positive outcomes against the stated objectives. While the assessed impacts may not match the expected outputs (as argued by many performance grant enthusiasts), these impacts provide a plausible basis for the sustained development and use of such grants. The alternative would be to continue to rely exclusively on the equity-based approaches that have dominated intergovernmental fiscal relations in Indonesia and have led to rather weak local public service outcomes.