Governments do not have perfect information regarding constituent priorities and needs. This lack of knowledge opens the door for groups to lobby in order to affect the government’s taxation levels. We examine the political economy of decentralized revenue-raising authority in light of social...

This paper examines the influence of political considerations on intergovernmental fiscal transfers in Ghana. The two-step system GMM approach was used to estimate transfers and elections data for 167 districts from 1994 to 2014. The analysis was country-wide and covers swing districts as well...

In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite budgets of all 216 MMDAs, we...

The federal character principle is Nigeria's primary formula for mitigating horizontal inequality and conflict in this chronically fractured society. Designed to guarantee inter-group inclusion in the conduct and composition of governmental institutions, the principle spans direct, integrative,...

The existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in the context of a developing country that can...

Using data from various rounds of the nationally representative NSSO survey between 1988 and 2012, we first construct national, state, and district-level figures for overall, within and between consumption inequality. We find an increase in inequality in India but only since 2004. We also...

How does the public provision of education and the deployment of distortionary tax and subsidy instruments differ when the government's objective is conventional welfarist compared to when the objective is the non-welfarist one of equality of opportunity? This paper develops a framework in which...

In this paper, we study the impact of ethnic fragmentation on the provision of private and public schools, separately. The distinction is made because the two types of schools have different objective functions, a factor which can influence the relationship between ethnic fragmentation and...

The development of institutions of self-governance in India, and specifically the 2005 reform - the National Rural Health Mission that introduced village health and sanitation committees - provide a unique opportunity to study the effects of the strengthening of the political agency on...

This paper draws on both successful and failing cases of industrialization in China to analyse the role of local governments in fostering the growth of light manufacturing. The broad spectrum of support types and the intimate knowledge of enterprise conditions by these local governments make...