Peru represents a laboratory for examining the different approaches to the centralized or decentralized delivery of public services over the past quarter of a century. There is a renewed and increasing interest in decentralization in Peru as a mechanism to generate more involved decision making...

This paper argues that both horizontal and intertemporal competition among recipient governments are needed in order to ensure incentives for effective utilization of targeted transfers. This has implications for budgeting frameworks and the types of information needed, that might be amenable to...