Currently there is a propensity that decentralized hierarchy is adopted by organizations. Vast realms of research endeavor have been committed to understand the advantages and setbacks of decentralized organizations, and their results indicate that inadequate decentralization will constrain the creativity of employees while over decentralization may push the company towards chaos. However, litt...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether decentralization has improved health system performance in the State of Ceara, north-east Brazil. METHODS Ceara is strongly committed to decentralization. A survey across 45 local (municipio) health systems collected data on performance and formal organization, including decentralization, informal management and local political culture. The indicators for informal...

We study secessionist conflict driven by cultural and economic motives in a political union of two regions, and analyze under what conditions partial decentralization may serve as a conflict-mitigating strategy. While the probability of a successful secession is increasing in heterogeneity, it is increasing in interregional income inequality if and only if the union is socially efficient to sta...

An important piece of the major fiscal and structural reforms undertaken in Argentina in the early 1990’s was the decentralization of education services from the federal government to the provincial governments. The theoretical literature does not find absolute superiority of centralization or decentralization in the provision of public services. We evaluate empirically the effect of the decent...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while political decentralization has no impact. These results are robust to the choice of control variables and...

Article history: Received 16 August 2011 Received in revised form 5 February 2013 Accepted 12 February 2013 Available online xxxx This article examines the quantitative effects of the Chinese fiscal system on the increasing regional income inequality in China, from 1978 to 2007. Fiscal decentralization is a multifaceted concept not likely to be captured by a single measure. This paper investiga...

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 finding 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 benefits of decen...

a r t i c l e i n f o The decentralization of resource property rights has become an increasingly popular policy in many natural resource-dependent communities of the developing world. However, the success of this policy approach depends on both collective action and institutionalization. It is therefore important to evaluate collective action and insti-tutionalization where the process of prop...