There is considerable regional variation in incomes and poverty in the Czech Republic and gaps have grown over time. With the highest number of municipalities per head in the OECD, subnational government is very fragmented and the resulting lack of capacity at the local level reduces the quality...

This paper investigates the local effects of mining on the quality of public services and on people's optimism about their future living conditions. It also assesses the mediating role of local institutions and local governments 'taxing rights in shaping the proximity-to-mine effects. The...

In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite budgets of all 216 MMDAs, we...

Decentralisation, which sends power and resources from the Central to local governments, comes with several theoretical promises. One such promise is the improvement in local service provision. However, achieving these theoretical promises of decentralization has been a big challenge in most...

This paper, which is borne out of the need to address scarcity of evidence-based studies on barangay financing, analyzes and evaluates key issues on financing of devolved functions at the barangay level, with particular focus on fund utilization and program allocation, and proposes some policy...