"Dissatisfied with centralized approaches to delivering local public services, a large number of countries are decentralizing responsibility for these services to lower-level, locally elected governments. The results have been mixed. The paper provides a framework for evaluating the benefits and...

The objective of this report is to provide background and context on the housing and utilities sector in Belarus, focusing in particular on Bank-funded Water, Waste management, and biomass-based district heating projects. The report aims to assess the existing Social Accountability (SA)...

The report examines the local government sector in Kenya, the reform and decentralization process, and the dynamics of local service delivery. The report is organized in three parts. The first, traces the broad contours of the reform process in Kenya: the inter-governmental system, local...

Serbia's ability to achieve macroeconomic stabilization and restructure its public finances has been, and will continue to be, impacted by the policy actions of its sub-national governments. For the purposes of this paper, these include the province of Vojvodina and municipal governments. In...

The "Public Service Unit" (PSU), or shiye danwei, is one of the four categories of public sector institutions in China. The country has more than one million public service units (PSUs), or shiye danwei, with a labor force of around 30 million. Most PSUs were created as public service providers....

The purpose of the baseline assessment is to provide baseline information on women access to public services, especially health, water, and population administration services. One of the objectives of decentralization is to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, quality, equity, accessibility,...

One objective of decentralization is to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, quality, equity, accessibility, and responsiveness of public service delivery. But up to now, various service pictures show how women have more limited access to good public services. Maternal, infant, and children...

This policy note analyzes the composition of public expenditures that support devolved services (including the resource allocation decisions that support these expenditures), an assessment of the quality of local service delivery based on available local data, and an evaluation of the...

The present study describes, and quantifies the provision of basic urban services to the poor, in three Central American cities in El Salvador, Honduras, and, Panama. It also identifies priority areas for government intervention, using specialized household surveys to quantify current deficits,...