In many African countries, decentralization has long been viewed as a means for improving local service delivery. Yet, despite various decentralization initiatives, poor service delivery continues to be problematic in two of Kenya's largest cities, Nairobi and Mombasa. Despite various governance...

This study examines the role of politics on decentralization and service delivery in South Africa, with a specific focus on Johannesburg and Cape Town. The research delineates how national decentralization has affected service delivery responsibilities and resources, determines whether service...

In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the...

In this paper, we review the main issues under discussion in the field of economics of education, with a special focus on Latin America. We seek to organize the debate about educational policies by showing how these policies respond to different models based on different assumptions and...

Since 1932, when Justice Louis Brandeis remarked that in a federal system states can serve as "laboratories" of democracy, political decentralization has been thought to stimulate policy experimentation. We reexamine the political economy behind this belief, using a simple model of voting in...

Public administration reform as a response to the requirements of socio-economic environment change, is a process that develops both at central and local level, aiming to an institutional framework achievement, suitable for administrative and financial decentralization, under the European Union...

The processes of the region until now are oriented fundamentally to ensure the accomplishment of national social policies. How to make to orient them also to harness the local autonomy –and mainly to do it in conditions of equality– in order to make the local and regional development...

China’s actual fiscal decentralization is one-sided: while public expenditures are largely decentralized, fiscal revenues are recentralized after 1994. One critical consequence of the actual system is the creation of significant fiscal imbalances at sub-national level. This paper investigates...

This essay brings a synthesize of the doctoral thesis named "Essays in Political Economy:;Evidence from Brazil", which provides relevant contribution towards our understanding regarding the incentives and constraints that local governments face in the context of a federalist system. The analysis...

We compare centralized and decentralized policy making in a federation in which policy heterogeneity is inherently costly and preferences vary across jurisdictions: all jurisdictions agree that some harmonization is desirable but no one agrees on the direction of harmonization. This type of...