For almost two decades, starting from the early ‘90s, Italy experienced the strongest wave of decentralization reforms … situation of "fiscal federalism" in Italy before the crisis, summarizing the decentralization process in the ‘90s, its …

-transfers, which distorts the central-local distribution of resources. Applying the model to fiscal decentralization, we find when … decentralization widens local governments' fiscal gap, borrowings by both local and central governments rise. Quantitatively, fiscal … decentralization accounts for from 19 percent to 40 percent of changes in general government debt in Spain during 1988-2006. A …

line with the hypothesis that greater revenue decentralization (measured as sub-national governments’ share of own source …