Finnish municipalities enjoy ample fiscal autonomy and provide or arrange the provision of a large share of public services. In recent years, their spending and debt has been increasing steadily, especially because of population ageing and increases in the cost of health care and social...

This paper assesses how decentralization can contribute, if proper political and fiscal institutions are present, to improving service delivery in Asia. In other words, decentralization is an opportunity and a challenge at the same time. The paper presents the salient characteristics of...

The paper provides empirical analysis of the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and the quality of public services in the Russian regions. The analysis suggests that fiscal decentralisation has no significant effect on the key inputs into secondary education, such as schools,...

This paper assesses how decentralization can contribute, if proper political and fiscal institutions are present, to improving service delivery in Asia. In other words, decentralization is an opportunity and a challenge at the same time. The paper presents the salient characteristics of...

This paper uses cross-national data to examine the effects of different dimensions of decentralization on the efficiency of educational policies in OECD countries. The results show that the autonomy of subnational governments, both on the expenditure and revenue sides of their activities, is...

Within the context of reigniting post crisis macroeconomic growth, income inequality has emerged as a topic of significant interest for both academics and policymakers (Bastagli, Coady, and Gupta, 2012) This study builds on past literature on fiscal decentralization suggesting that...

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...

This paper studies how fiscal decentralization affects local services. It explores a 1993 reform that increased the fiscal autonomy of Italian municipalities by replacing government transfers with revenues from a local property tax. Our identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the...

Many industrialized countries have recently implemented fiscal decentralization reforms assigning more competences and spending responsibilities to sub-national governments. In this paper we investigate what leads to the decentralization of different categories of public expenditure in 19...

What is decentralization, what is its underpinning rationale, and why might it matter for least-developed countries? This chapter has two goals: (i) to distill the enormous academic and policy literature on international experiences of decentralization into clear empirical conclusions; and (ii)...