IN AN OLD music classroom in the Culture Palace in Tlaxcala, two hours’ drive east of Mexico City, sits Alejandra Frausto, Mexico’s culture minister. She hopes her new office’s bare walls will soon sport a screen for video-conferencing with Mexico City and beyond. Hers is one of the first two ministries to move under a policy of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, usually known as AMLO, elected last year. Resurrecting an idea first mooted in the 1980s, he wants to move a big central-government body to each of 30 Mexican states. Tlaxcala’s state capital has 85,000 people, only eight times more than the culture ministry’s staff in Mexico City. Ms Frausto dreams of one day having thousands of workers in the state.
Revolutionary as AMLO’s plan sounds, it is part of a global trend. Around the world, capital cities are disgorging bureaucrats.
In the post-colonial fervour of the 20th century, coastal capitals picked by trade-focused empires were spurned for “regionally neutral” new ones, such as Brasilia (Brazil), Islamabad (Pakistan) and Dodoma (Tanzania); more recently, Kazakhstan built Nursultan (née Astana) and Myanmar Naypyidaw. But decamping wholesale is costly and unpopular; governments these days prefer piecemeal dispersal.
Take Norway, which since 2006 has shifted 1,600 civil-service jobs out of Oslo. The competition authority is in Bergen, the second city. The polar institute was packed off to a town not far short of the North Pole. And last year the Norwegian peace corps, Norec, an agency that oversees programmes in 25 poorer countries, moved to Forde, a settlement of 13,000 people nestled between mountains, rivers and fjords.
Mexico and Norway are just two of many. South Korea has moved two-thirds of its government agencies away from Seoul, many of them to the newly built Sejong City. Since 2015 Denmark has moved thousands of government jobs to scores of cities. Malaysia shifted many of its paper-pushers in 1999 from Kuala Lumpur to a new city called Putrajaya. Indonesia is mulling moving its capital from Jakarta.
The trend reflects how the world has changed. In past eras, when information travelled at a snail’s pace, civil servants had to cluster together. But now desk-workers can ping emails and video-chat around the world. Travel for face-to-face meetings may be unavoidable, but transport links, too, have improved. Forde, Norec’s new base, is 400km from Oslo but offers five hour-long flights to the capital a day.
Proponents of moving civil servants around promise countless benefits. It disperses the risk that a terrorist attack or natural disaster will cripple an entire government. Wonks in the sticks will be inspired by new ideas that walled-off capitals cannot conjure up. Autonomous regulators perform best far from the pressure and lobbying of the big city. Some even hail a cure for ascendant cynicism and populism. The unloved bureaucrats of faraway capitals will become as popular as firefighters once they mix with regular folk.
Beyond these sunny visions, dispersing central-government functions usually has three specific aims: to improve the lives of both civil servants and those living in clogged capitals; to save money; and to redress regional imbalances. The trouble is that these goals are not always realised.
The first aim—improving living conditions—has a long pedigree. After the second world war Britain moved thousands of civil servants to “agreeable English country towns” as London was rebuilt. But swapping the capital for somewhere smaller is not always agreeable. Attrition rates can exceed 80%. Even the footloose youngsters Norec tends to employ bridled. One, Magnhild Bogseth, recalls: “When I moved to Paraguay or Nicaragua, my friends never asked: ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ But when I came to Forde, they all said: ‘Will you really be happy there? Your social life will be destroyed!’” Many locals also struggle to adjust. When a Norec worker convinced her Colombian boyfriend to move with her from Oslo, the town newspaper reported his arrival on its front page.
As for those left living in the capital, a review in 1962 in Britain urged further dispersal to improve their “health and welfare”. Similarly, the Netherlands pointed to congestion and a housing shortage when moving government jobs in the late 1960s. Egypt’s generals cite congestion and pollution in Cairo to justify building a new, still unnamed capital in the desert.
The second reason to pack bureaucrats off is to save money. Office space costs far more in capitals. When London’s property market stagnated in the late 1970s the government lost enthusiasm for relocation. Agencies that are moved elsewhere can often recruit better workers on lower salaries than in capitals, where well-paying multinationals mop up talent.
Balancing act
The third reason to shift is to rebalance regional inequality. In Mexico AMLO laments the “tragedy” of those who have to move to big cities to make a living. The day the culture ministry opened in Tlaxcala, 70 locals turned up with their CVs. When Britain moved 20% of London’s civil servants between 2003 and 2010, it often picked areas with high unemployment, such as Newport, a Welsh city hit by industrial decline that now houses the headquarters of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Norway treats federal jobs as a resource every region deserves to enjoy, like profits from oil.
Where government jobs go, private ones follow. A study of Berlin after Germany’s federal workforce was moved from Bonn in 1999 found that the arrival of 100 government jobs in an area helped create 55 private-sector jobs. A review of Britain’s relocations in the 2000s found the same ratio. The jobs created tend to be in services, often the law or consultancy.
Sometimes the aim is to fulfil the potential of a country’s second-tier cities. Unlike poor, remote places, bigger cities can make the most of relocated government agencies, linking them to local universities and businesses and supplying a better-educated workforce. The decision in 1946 to set up America’s Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta rather than Washington, DC, has transformed the city into a hub for health-sector research and business.
The dilemma is obvious. Pick small, poor towns, and areas of high unemployment get new jobs, but it is hard to attract the most qualified workers; opt for larger cities with infrastructure and better-qualified residents, and the country’s most deprived areas see little benefit.
Whatever the motives, relocations are difficult. Norec’s move to Forde prompted 34 of its 42 staff to resign—and that 20% stayed was, boasts its director, a record high for Norway. When the civil-aviation authority moved to the Arctic Circle, almost all its flight inspectors quit. The loss of expertise took years to replace. Similarly, Denmark’s 465-strong environmental protection agency is moving from Copenhagen to Odense, Denmark’s third city. Of its 16 toxicologists, 12 intend to resign.
Staff disgruntlement is not the only problem. Places are often chosen for political reasons. Forde scored worst on a three-town shortlist for hosting Norec. A local politician is credited with swaying the final call. In 2016 Australia’s then deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, helped move the pesticides and veterinary authority to a town in his own constituency. More brazen still was Augusto Pinochet’s displacement of Chile’s congress from Santiago to his hometown of Valparaíso, where it remains.
Others contend that decentralisation begets corruption by making government agencies less accountable. Egypt’s new capital will be far from the residents of Cairo, whose protests overthrew a dictator in 2011. A study in America found that state-government corruption is worse when the state capital is isolated—journalists, who tend to live in the bigger cities, become less watchful of those in power.
But resistance can be formidable and relocation plans are often aborted. Workers and unions oppose them. Ministers incur the short-term costs of disruption and unpopularity but rarely reap the benefits of greater regional equality. In Japan in 2014 Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, proposed a relocation drive to free up space in Tokyo, which has faced concerted opposition.
Stuck in the swamp
Washington, DC, a town designed as a humble alternative to bigger cities that has since become America’s sixth-largest economic area, is another stage for this battle. Two cabinet secretaries, Ryan Zinke at Interior (who resigned in December) and Sonny Perdue at Agriculture, proposed moving agencies from the capital. Mr Zinke eventually backed down. Mr Perdue, who did not, faces acrimony from his own staff. Three bills that order the moving of agencies from the capital are stuck in congressional committees.
Norway once saw similar lethargy. Piecemeal proposals floated in the 1970s were never implemented. But in the early 2000s politicians, hoping for new jobs in their own backyard, all mobilised behind a single policy, says Rune Dahl Fitjar of the University of Stavanger. The government hid its plans from public-sector unions, who had little time to oppose it and no right to strike against it, says John Leirvaag, a union leader. Most vital was political leadership—a prime minister determined to make it happen.
In MexicoAMLOshould in theory find decentralisation less arduous. He was elected with a huge mandate on a promise to fix the country’s regional disparities, the widest in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. But his dream of moving all or even most government workers is a long way off, if it is even to happen at all. Unlike their Norwegian counterparts, Mexican bureaucrats have no obligation to leave the capital. A promise to move several offices on his first day was dropped. Each dispersed ministry will begin as a kind of satellite office for the main one in Mexico City. The ministers will show up once a week. “We cannot stop having a base in the capital,” says Victor Manuel Villalobos, whose agriculture ministry opened an office in Sonora, in Mexico’s north, last month.
Tlaxcala offers a reasonably reassuring precedent. Life there is quiet. In 2017 journalists sardonically reported the installation of the state’s first escalator. But it also lacks the capital’s traffic, pollution and violence, and boasts the best corn tortillas in Mexico. One of the few new arrivals says she is happier working here. “We used to live in an apartment in Mexico City. No flowers, nothing green,” she says. “Now my daughter has a garden.”