Article history: Received 11 September 2007 Received in revised form 9 September 2008 Accepted 10 September 2008 Available online 16 September 2008 How does political decentralization affect the frequency and costliness of bribe extraction by corrupt officials? Previous empirical studies, using subjective indexes of perceived corruption and mostly fiscal indicators of decentralization, have sug...

The crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG) receives descending neuromodulatory inputs from three anterior ganglia, the paired commissural ganglia (CoGs) and the single esophageal ganglion (OG). In this paper we provide the first detailed and quantitative analyses of the short- and long-term effects of removal of these descending inputs (decentralization) on the pyloric rhythm of the STG. Thir...

BACKGROUND During the 1990s, the government of Tanzania introduced the decentralization by devolution (D by D) approach involving the transfer of functions, power and authority from the centre to the local government authorities (LGAs) to improve the delivery of public goods and services, including health services. OBJECTIVE This article examines and documents the experiences facing the imple...

Decentralization occupies an important space in debates over public-sector reform in doi moi Vietnam. This paper assesses the changing distribution of roles, responsibilities and resources across levels of government over the past decade. Vietnam is incrementally transfering greater administrative and fiscal responsibilities to the provincial level. In addition, the Communist Party is attemptin...

I investigate the impact of environmental volatility and the cost of information on the preferred organizational structure, as determined by the allocation of decision rights, the compensation structure of the managers and the degree of operational integration (such as the use of shared distribution and marketing channels across the operating divisions). The results are broadly consistent with ...

There is a widespread sense that over the last two decades firms have been decentralizing decisions to employees further down the managerial hierarchy. Economists have developed a range of theories to account for delegation, but there is less empirical evidence, especially across countries. This has limited the ability to understand the phenomenon of decentralization. To address this empirical ...

What are the drivers of sub-national variation in forestry outcomes under a uniform national decentralization policy? The literature on decentralized governance of natural resources in developing countries is decidedly mixed in terms of theory and findings. Some scholars argue that decentralization reforms will lead to improved policy outcomes, other scholars view decentralization with great sk...

The contextual theory of political participation in non-electoral politics developed in this paper supposes that more open political opportunity structure of a respective state increases both, the individual non-electoral participation and mobilization into this participation, since the decentralized political institutions send a message that more access points to influence politics are availab...

Introduction Fifty years after Gandhi wrote the words above, India embarked on what may prove to be one of the most significant changes in its structures of governance, the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution of India, which give local governments, rural and urban, a legal status that they formerly lacked. If these institutional reforms towards greater decentralization of governance do...

In this paper we test the Leviathan hypothesis, focusing on the joint impact of fiscal decentralization and legislative monopoly power in the growth of the public sector. Two proxies of legislative monopoly power are considered: the control of all relevant houses by the executive party and the margin of majority. Using a dynamic panel-based error correction model on OECD member countries, we fi...