Peru represents a laboratory for examining the different approaches to the centralized or decentralized delivery of public services over the past quarter of a century. There is a renewed and increasing interest in decentralization in Peru as a mechanism to generate more involved decision making...

This chapter provides an overview of the key issues in public economics arising from the process of territorial decentralisation that has taken place in Spain since the restoration of democracy and the Constitution of 1978, and which resulted in the emergence of the “Autonomic State”. The...

In spite of their long history and constitutional status, local governments in Bangladesh have a poor record of being an efficient, accountable and responsive provider of public services at local level. Over the decades, the local government system in Bangladesh has been “more an area of...

El objetivo principal de este trabajo es examinar, comparar y extraer lecciones del proceso de descentralización en cuatro países latinoamericanos de pequeño tamaño. Varias lecciones se desprenden de este ejercicio. Primero, el proceso de descentralización puede ser virtualmente tan...

Based on a sample of 227 elections in seventeen Western European countries over the period of 1945-1998, this paper examines to what extent party systems are shaped by fiscal and political decentralization. With the exception of a few special cases, empirical evidence does not support the...

The last two centuries have seen the rise of the nation-state as the dominant political institution around the world. During this period, the colonial empires of varying duration and reach created first by the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, then the French and British, then the Germans and...

This report is about the fiscal performance of rural local governments in the state of West Bengal. Specifically, our goal is to develop a comprehensive fiscal information system for all rural local governments, and to use these data to valuate the intergovernmental finance structure in the...

Since Yemen’s reunification in 1990, decentralization reforms periodically resurface on the national political agenda. They seem to offer a positive way to address the major political and developmental challenges that the country is facing: to build a modern State in a tribal society, to...