Decentralization has long been advocated as a desirable process for improving health systems. Nevertheless, we still lack a sufficient analytical framework for systematically studying how decentralization can achieve this objective. We do not have adequate means of analyzing the three key elements of decentralization: (1) the amount of choice that is transferred from central institutions to ins...

The purpose of this study is to explore the link between decentralization and the impact of natural disasters through empirical analysis. It addresses the issue of the importance of the role of local government in disaster response through different means of decentralization. By studying data available for 50 countries, it allows to develop the knowledge on the role of national government in se...

Mohammed, North, and Ashton find that decentralization in Fiji shifted health-sector workloads from tertiary hospitals to peripheral health centres, but with little transfer of administrative authority from the centre. Decisionmaking in five functional areas analysed remains highly centralized. They surmise that the benefits of decentralization in terms of services and outcomes will be limited....

National governments in almost all developing countries have begun to decentralize policies and decision making related to development, public services, and the environment. Existing research on the subject has enhanced our understanding of the effects of decentralization and thereby has been an effective instrument in the advocacy of decentralization. But most analyses, especially where enviro...

We argue that decentralization is particularly beneficial to firm performance in “bad times”. We present a model where bad times increase the importance of rapid action, and improve the alignment of incentives of managers within firms. We test this idea exploiting the 2008-2009 Great Recession using firm-level cross country panel data combined with our survey data on firm organization. We find ...

While some recent evidence suggests that more decentralization is associated with reduced corruption, no empirical work has examined whether different types of decentralization have differential effects on corruption. The theoretical literature has emphasized that expenditure decentralization will only be effective if accompanied by the devolution of revenue generation to local governments. In ...

Efficient logistics systems move essential medicines down the supply chain to the service delivery point, and then to the end user. Experts on logistics systems tend to see the supply chain as requiring centralized control to be most effective. However, many health reforms have involved decentralization, which experts fear has disrupted the supply chain and made systems less effective. There is...

A ll around the world in matters of governance, decentralization is the rage. Even apart from the widely debated issues of subsidiarity and devolution in the European Union and states’ rights in the United States, decentralization has been at the center stage of policy experiments in the last two decades in a large number of developing and transition economies in Latin America, Africa and Asia....

This paper revisits the influential “Leviathan” hypothesis, which posits that tax competition limits the growth of government spending in decentralized countries. It uses panel data to examine the effect of fiscal decentralization over time within countries, attempting to distinguish between decentralization that is funded by intergovernmental transfers and local taxation. First, it sets out a ...

This paper revisits the well-known ...scal "Decentralization Theorem" of Oates(1972), by relaxing the role of the assumption that governments are benevolent, while retaining the assumption of policy uniformity. If instead, decisions are made by direct majority voting, the theorem fails. Speci...cally, (i) centralization can welfare-dominate decentralization even if there are no externalities an...