A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. We argue that such learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a...

I discuss a dynamic version of the Zodrow-Miezskowski model, where world capital supply is not fixed. The time horizon of the welfare maximizing government is assumed to be infinite whereas the household sector is designed according to the two-period overlapping-generations model. Thus social...

A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. We argue that such learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a...

I discuss a dynamic version of the Zodrow-Miezskowski model, where world capital supply is not fixed. The time horizon of the welfare maximizing government is assumed to be infinite whereas the household sector is designed according to the two-period overlapping-generations model. Thus social...

It has only been in the recent years that developing countries are increasingly decentralizing the provision of health care to their local governments. This paper explores some key issues related to health decentralization in the Philippines identified in literature and in course of interviews...

The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However,...

Fiscal federalism concerns the division of policy responsibilities among different levels of government. Many current economic and policy developments, such as globalization, environmental crises and rising inequality, may not appear to be favorable to fiscal federalism, yet countries are...