Given the advantages, in terms of efficiency, both users of public services as the analysts seem to discover the theoretical decentralized supply of some goods and, at a time like this, where the process of transferring skills health to the autonomous communities has been completed, one wonders if indeed the health decentralization has contributed to increasing the productive efficiency of the centers.

With the intention of bringing some element of discussion in this regard, this article proposes an analysis that assesses and compares the production efficiency of the health centers in La Rioja, Alava and Navarre, whose management centers, in the year under review (1997), was in the hands of INSALUD (Rioja) and centers in autonomous communities that, at that time, had transferred all the powers on health (Navarre and Alava).

In a context such as the production of primary care, where technological differences and there are hardly any room for maneuver in the management of the centers is low, a marked differential in favor of behavioral health centers could be transferred to the indicative Decentralization has enabled some factor other than the purely technological (such as the introduction of incentives or adequate control mechanisms, better structural adjustment or the use of the advantage conferred by proximity to the particular needs of users, etc.) with positive effects on productive efficiency of the health centers.

In any case, since the direct allocation to the decentralization of the differences in production efficiency of health facilities is difficult to prove through statistical models, this article will cause decentralization as the nature of working hypotheses.