The end of the ten-year-long armed conflict between the Maoists and the government and the peace agreements of late 2006 brought widespread hope for a more inclusive and well-governed Nepal. However, six years later in early 2013, the failure to produce the promised new constitution and an...

This paper attempts to trace and find evidence for the linkages between the quality of governance, and development at the local level since the adoption of the fiscal decentralization policy in the Philippines in 1991. The concern since then over the links has been prompted by the observed...

The new EU development agenda is an adaptation of an old mismatch in development policy, which is the effort to join, on the one hand, donor-driven demand for good governance and democracy, and on the other hand, a commitment to the ownership of development strategies by the recipient countries....

Applying the general question of aid effectiveness to the sector of education, this paper reveals an overall positive effect of development assistance on primary enrolment. However, even the most optimistic estimates clearly show that at any realistic rate of growth, aid will never be able to...

Recent development cooperation with Guinea-Bissau, focusing on good governance, statebuilding and conflict prevention, did not contribute to democratization nor to the stabilization of volatile political, military and economic structures. The portrayal of Guinea- Bissau as a failed...

The WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) is a plurilateral Agreement, meaning that it comprises only a subset of the full Membership of the WTO. Currently, a number of WTO Members that are not Parties to the Agreement either are actively seeking accession to it, have commitments to...

The paper tries to shed some light on the problems of centralization and decentralization within an economic union and the federal member states. Integration and decentralization are not opposite policy strategies but both meaningful if the single public goods and services supplies are analyzed...

Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. Despite this consensus, 'good governance' is an extremely elusive objective: it means different things to different organizations and to different actors within these...

In this paper we analyze the influence of direct democratic institutions on the size and development of the shadow economies. The framework developed predicts a negative relationship between the degree of direct democracy and the size of the shadow economy. Countries where direct democratic...