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...

The traditional view of local politics and government in the Philippines is not flattering: elected officials are personalistic faction leaders (or worse, bosses or warlords) interested in parlaying their personal wealth and power rather than promoting good governance. Thus, it could be argued that decentralization by shifting power away from a reforming center to powerful irresponsible local p...

This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key ...nding is that the degree of uniformity (or “universalism”) of the provision of regional projects is endogenous, and depends on the strength of the externality. The welfare bene...ts of dece...

Across the developing world, many governments have implemented political reforms—heavily promoted by international donors—designed to transfer greater power to subnational levels of government and to provide a more substantial policymaking and oversight role to citizens. Although economic analyses have frequently argued that such decentralization programs improve the efficiency of public expend...

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 Impact of Local Decentralization on Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Counties We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose governments per...

Decentralization in the health sector has been widely implemented since the 1970s as a reform mechanism with mixed results. This study describes Fiji's 2 attempts at decentralizing its health sector and examines the implications they have had for the functions of planning, financing, and delivery of health services. The first wave attempted a major restructure by devolving Fiji's health system....

Objective The results of an evaluative longitudinal study, which identified the effects of health care decentralization on health financing in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru are presented in this article. Methods The methodology had two main phases. In the first, secondary sources of data and documents were analyzed with the following variables: type of decentralization implemented, source of finan...

Aaron Schneider is a political scientist at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. His research interests include comparative politics, public finance, and methodology. His current research projects include studies of federalism, decentralization, party systems, budgeting, and taxation. He has conducted research in Brazil and India, and plans to apply the measures der...

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...