— This article suggests that efforts to study decentralization outcomes would benefit from widening the unit of analysis from the local government administration to the local governance system. Many individual local governments, especially in developing countries, lack the human and physical resources to be effective governors by themselves. It is, thus, useful to recognize the linkages between...

This article explores the potential of the collaborative approach for local government program evaluation, particularly programs administered by nonprofits. City budget staff in Charlotte, North Carolina, partnered with the nonprofit in charge of a special tax district in a collaborative evaluation (CE) to assess the district's impact. An examination of this experience suggests that CEs are cos...

This rule implements subtitle A of title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Public Law 101-336, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by public entities. Subtitle A protects qualified individuals with disabilities from discrimination on the basis of disability in the services, programs, or activities of all State and local governments. It extends the prohibition of d...

This paper provides a self-contained overview of the present problems of state finances in India. It begins with an overview of historical evolution and current institutional structures, including economic, political, administrative and fiscal aspects of India’s federal system. The paper then reviews the current situation of India’s state government finances, going on to consider various develo...

This paper takes advantage of the overlapping geographies of Israeli military and Palestinian civil authority in the West Bank to examine the association between “partial”, or “fragmented”, statehood at the national level and the fiscal capacity of local governments. The main empirical finding is that local governments in areas of the West Bank that operate under shared Israeli-Palestinian cont...

We study the empirical consistency of survey based (micro level) indicators of social capital and local government performance on the one, and municipality based (aggregate level) measures of these two concepts on the other hand. Knowledge about the behavior of these indicators is helpful for evaluating the value of studies carried out in isolated contexts, that is, with access to data on eithe...

America’s local governments spend about one-eighth of our national income, one-fourth of total government spending, and employ over 14 million people. This paper surveys the large and growing economics literature on local governments and their finances. A primary difference between local and national government is the ease of labor mobility within countries, which disciplines local governments ...

Personnel systems and policies can have a substantial influence on the quality of local government. This paper shows that Japanese local governments provide stable and well-paid careers. Indeed, pay scales are slightly higher than those of central government staff. As a result, Japanese local governments have attracted good staff into their ranks and built up strong human resource capacity over...

Over the past decade, various means of decentralizing authority and responsibility to local governments have been discussed. It was broadly recognized that local government capacity would need to be strengthened considerably if the central government were to lessen its role in the intergovernmental fiscal system. Most Thai local governments have limited capacity for financial management, planni...