Article history: Received 18 August 2009 Received in revised form 9 February 2011 Accepted 19 March 2011 Available online 13 April 2011 No consensus has yet emerged on whether fiscal decentralization facilitates or impedes the growth of the public sector. One explanation for this ambiguity in the literature is that the effect of fiscal decentralization on public sector size depends on the gover...

The fiscal decentralization impulse now sweeping the world often leads to partial decentralization, where subnational governments are funded by central transfers, rather than leading to full local autonomy. Despite the practical important of this arrangement, the literature contains no economic analysis of a partial decentralization regime in a Tiebout-style model. This paper provides such an a...

Optimizing distributed learning systems is an art of balancing between computation and communication. There have been two lines of research that try to deal with slower networks: quantization for low bandwidth networks, and decentralization for high latency networks. In this paper, we explore a natural question: can the combination of both decentralization and quantization lead to a system that...

This paper provides a comparative assessment of fiscal decentralization in China and India, including the standard components of expenditure and revenue assignments and institutions for intergovernmental transfers, as well as the nature of sub-national authorities over general economic activity. In particular, the case of China, where town and village enterprises have been very active, is contr...

This article introduces a new concept to the study of decentralization processes: policy dynamism. At its core is the notion that the sequential and temporal process of health decentralization affect the nature of intergovernmental relationships and municipal bureaucratic capacity. Examining the case of Brazil, I argue that the rush to decentralize health services to municipalities has, in the ...

This paper revisits the fiscal "decentralization theorem", by relaxing the role of the assumption that governments are benevolent, while retaining the assumption of policy uniformity. If instead, decisions are made by direct majority voting, (i) centralization can welfare-dominate decentralization even if there are no externalities and regions are heterogenous; (ii) decentralization can welfare...

Over time, various drivers affecting information technology architecture design have been proposed which favored either more centralization or decentralization. With the advent of RFID and other sensor technologies, the next inflection point heading towards decentralization might arise. This paper aims to improve the understanding of the decentralization debate by investigating the factors that...

This paper contrasts decentralization in Hungary, one of the most decentralized countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and in Slovakia, one of the least decentralized, during the decade of transition from socialism to market. It also draws lessons based on this experience. Has decentralization been effective? Has decentralization improved the delivery of essential services? Has it promoted ef...

March, 2000 AFRICA N John Cohen was a product of the democratic frontier ethos of the American West. A rigorous stickler for accuracy of detail and fidelity to the facts, he was at the same time an unwavering optimist. His writing and teaching was infused with a moral vision––that ordinary men and women are endowed with the innate capacity to solve their common problems, to learn from mistakes ...