I examine decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics it unleashed in the much-noted case of Bolivia and the less-noted case of Bangladesh. I argue that the national effects of decentralization are largely the sum of its local-level effects. Hence to understand decentralization we...

This paper studies the impacts of village elections on the accountability of the village committee, local fiscal sharing, and state taxation in rural China using data of 48 villages for the period of 19862002. Elections are found to substantially increase the share of public expenditures in the...