Within China, government leaders are using information technology to drive efforts both to accelerate decentralized public administration and at the same time to enhance government’s ability to oversee key activities. The concurrent pursuit of these two seemingly paradoxical objectives is, in turn, motivated by an explicit desire to modernize and make more competitive the Chinese economy. Consi...

In the institutional context of China’s political centralization and fiscal decentralization, this study explores environmental regulations that make central local governments join efforts in air pollution control. Policy simulations an evolutionary game show best approach is to internalize costs benefits governments’ objective function. The effectiveness several policy instruments examined ind...

This paper develops ideal estimators to causally estimate the effect of two education reforms in India that expanded the access to schooling. These policies differed in their levels of decentralization in decision making. The different administrative levels decided which inputs the funds were allocated for and where the school-building was targeted. Comparing the two policies, I find evidence t...

Spatial Decentralization and Program Evaluation: Theory and an Example from Indonesia This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are responsive to t...

This chapter presents a case study on rural e-municipalities in Kyrgyzstan as an enabling tool for facilitating and supporting democratic local governance. The authors examine the case based on their action research and discuss key findings in terms of challenges of implementing and sustaining ICT-enabled local governance observed throughout the life cycle of the real life project. The case pre...

This paper describes a novel re-keying function protocol (NRFP) for wireless sensor network security. A re-keying process management system for sensor networks is designed to support in-network processing. The design of the protocol is motivated by decentralization key management for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), covering key deployment, key refreshment, and key establishment. NRFP supports ...

HIV/AIDS stigma continues affecting the provision of health services to people living with HIV/AIDS, as well as their physical and mental well-being. Scientific literature has highlighted the importance of understanding stigma manifestations that surpass one-on-one social interactions. For that reason, social research in Puerto Rico and elsewhere has highlighted the importance of understanding ...

When Woodrow Wilson advanced the principle of self-determination in a series of speeches in 1918–19, his assumption seemed to be that acknowledging the claims of self-determination was a simple corollary of respect for democracy. Contemporary secessionists, and many who write and theorize about secession, share Wilson’s intuition about this. It is widely claimed that a ‘people’ has the right to...

We study the effect of decentralization on corruption in a political agency model from the perspective of a region. In a model where corruption opportunities are lower under centralization at each period of time, decentralization makes easier for citizens to detect corrupt incumbents. As a consequence, the relationship between fiscal decentralization and corruption is conditional on political c...