This study examines the impact of political decentralization on an essential public service provided in almost all countries: childhood immunization. The relationship is examined empirically using a time-series data set of 140 low- and middle-income countries from 1980 to 1997. The study finds that decentralization has different effects in low- and middle-income countries. In the low-income gro...

BACKGROUND Fiscal Decentralization (FD) in many cases is encouraged as a strong means of improving the efficiency and equity in the provision of public goods, such as healthcare services. This issue has urged the researchers to experimentally examine the relationship between fiscal decentralization indicators and health outcomes. In this study we examine the effect of Fiscal Decentralization in...

Excessive borrowing by subnational governments due to soft budget constraints and intergovernmental coordination failures might be one of the perils of decentralization. Despite a large body of case studies, empirical investigations on whether decentralization increases consolidated public debt levels are still scarce. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring econometrically for se...

The views presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the INTRODUCTION Donor and development organizations have prescribed decentralization to promote accountability and transparency, public participation in policy making and democratization. The donor agency and development administration literature considers the types of decentralization, the dyn...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relation between decentralization and equity of resource allocation in Colombia and Chile. METHODS The "decision space" approach and analysis of expenditures and utilization rates were used to provide a comparative analysis of decentralization of the health systems of Colombia and Chile. FINDINGS Evidence from Colombia and Chile suggests that decentralization, u...

The relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties is an important element in the recent debate on institutional design. The theoretical literature makes ambiguous predictions about this relationship, and it has remained virtually unexamined by empiricists. In this paper, we make a first attempt at examining this issue empiric...

We examine the relationship between fiscal decentralization and the functional composition of public expenditures. Using a distance-sensitive representative agent model, we hypothesize that higher levels of fiscal decentralization induce agents to demand increased production of publicly provided private goods. We test this hypothesis using an unbalanced panel data set of 59 developed and develo...

This paper studies the effect of fiscal and political decentralization on the death toll by disasters for up to 46 developing and transitional economies from 1974 to 2004. The results show that elected government at the local level does not help mitigate disaster risk. This study underscores the importance of the joint effects of different forms of decentralization and shows that when political...