Brazil's inequalities in welfare and poverty across and within regions can be accounted for by differences in household attributes and returns to those attributes. This paper uses Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions at the mean as well as at different quantiles of welfare distributions on regionally...

Around the world, in both developed and developing countries, policy makers use a variety of tools to manage and accommodate urban growth and redevelopment. Government officials have three main concerns in terms of land policy: (i) accommodating urban expansion, (ii) providing infrastructure,...

The trend toward ever greater urbanization continues unabated across the globe. According to the United Nations, by 2025 closes to 5 billion people will live in urban areas. Many cities, especially in the developing world, are set to explode in size. Over the next decade and a half, Lagos is...

Housing matters to the livability of cities and to the productivity of their economies. The failure of cities to accommodate the housing needs of growing urban populations can be seen in the proliferation of poorly serviced, high-density informal settlements. Such settlements are not new in the...

The paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of fiscal decentralization within Russian regions in 1994-2001. The conventional view that more decentralized governments are found in regions and countries with higher income, higher ethnolinguistic fractionalization, and higher...

Empirical studies send mixed messages as to the magnitude of social stigma associated with the take-up of social transfers and the impact of stigma on take-up. These mixed signals may be related to the fact that stigma and program participation are likely to be jointly determined. If there is a...

The authors estimate the effect on business start-ups of a program that significantly speeds up firm registration procedures. The program was implemented in Mexico in different municipalities at different dates. Authors estimates suggest that new start-ups increased by about 4 percent in...

This paper presents a methodology to evaluate fiscal decentralization focusing on the potential mis-targeting of intergovernmental fiscal equalization transfers. The approach builds on an explicit comparison and the summary measurement of different (horizontal) allocation distributions across...

In China, most of the service delivery responsibilities are assigned to the subnational governments. Yet for reasons of efficiency in tax collection and administration, the central government collects revenues far in excess of its expenditure needs. In 2003 the central government collected 70...

The authors consider the malaise with the present set-up of fiscal federalism in Mexico from the points of view of the main players-the federal government, the states, the municipalities, and the citizen voters-in order to identify the areas of potential common interest as well as the direct...