"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...

Empirical results from India suggest that politicians exert greater effort in managing public works during election years. Surprisingly, there is no evidence of a populist spending spree to sway voters just before elections

A framework for understanding both bad public sector performance and good through surveys of public officals - and for presenting the results to policymakers in a format that leads to more informed choices about public sector reform