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Command and Can’t Control: Assessing Centralized Accountability in the Public Sector

Saad Gulzar,Juan Felipe Ladino,Muhammad Zia Mehmood,Daniel Rogger

Published 2025 in Unknown venue

ABSTRACT

A long-established approach to management in government has been the transmission of information up a hierarchy, centralized decision-making by senior management, and corresponding centralized accountability; colloquially known as ‘command and control’. This paper examines the effectiveness of a centralized accountability system implemented at scale in Punjab, Pakistan for six years. The scheme automatically identified poorly performing schools and jurisdictions for the attention of central management. We find that flagging of schools and corresponding de facto punishments had no impact on school or student outcomes. We use detailed data on key elements of the education production function to show that command and control approaches to managing the general public sector do not induce bureaucratic action towards improvements in government performance. jel codes: D73, H11, H83 ∗We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Blavatnik School of Government/Education Commission DeliverEd program, and the World Bank’s i2i initiative, Knowledge Change Program, and Governance Global Practice. We thank Belen Torino for excellent research assistance and our counterparts at the Punjab Program Monitoring and Implementation Unit for providing us with data and details of the institutional environment. Finally, we thank Faisal Bari, Michael Callen, Alessandra Fenizia, Koen Geven, Dan Honig, Clare Leaver, Rabea Malik, Imran Rasul and Martin Williams for their guidance and useful comments; and, seminar participants at Berkeley, the Education Commission, Georgetown, the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford, and the World Bank. All errors are our own. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. †Gulzar: Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Ladino: Department of Economics, Stockholm University; Mehmood: Haas Business School, University of California Berkeley; Rogger: World Bank Development Impact Evaluation Research Department.

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