The economic growth and the pace of change in Vietnam over the last decade have been impressive. A number of the reform achievements were centred on reforms at central level, e.g. legal and regulatory frameworks, national policy frameworks etc. The number of provinces in Vietnam has grown 60%...

This paper analyses whether the different powers and resources at the disposal of local and regional governments across Europe deliver greater satisfaction with political institutions and lead to greater personal happiness. The analysis uses microdata from the four available waves of the...

In many countries that have decentralized, improving the accountability of local officials is increasingly emphasized to make them more responsive to their constituents' needs. This paper provides evidence that the public announcement of performance ratings can induce local governments to become...

The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22...

This paper is based on the conjecture that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by drawing on a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a pricipal component analysis, seven aspects of both...

We provide an explanation why centralisation of political decision makingresults in overspending in some policy domains, whereas too low spending persists in others.We study a model in which delegates from jurisdictions bargain over local public goods provision.If all of the costs of public...

Formal and informal institutions are often viewed as complements or substitutes in empirical and theoretical works. However, no evidence of complementarities or substitutes is found in our empirical analysis of the interrelation between formal and informal decentralization across 64 provinces of...

Föderalismus und Dezentralisierung sind Themen, die weltweit einen festen Platz auf der politischen Agenda einnehmen. Dezentralisierungsprozesse treten bspw. verstärkt in zahlreichen osteuropäischen Staaten aber auch in Spanien, Belgien und in und vielen Entwicklungsländern auf. Diese...