Countries differ in their governmental architectures and in the rules that describe the allocation of tasks, rights and duties across the various levels of government. In this paper, we present a short and selective survey of the development of the theory of optimal allocation of rights and...

This paper, part of a larger project on governance and growth in Russia. It deals with the problems and priorities of the future development of primary producer regions of Russia. We design a regional strategy for socioeconomic development to 2025-2030. The analysis concerns growth and...

The paper reconsiders the theory of fiscal federalism in a framework inspired by property-rights theory. We set up a two-period model where on a first stage a region in a federation can expend value-enhancing investments into a public project. The project can be implemented on a second stage,...

The Coronavirus pandemic has put extreme pressure on public health services, often delivered at the local and regional levels of government. The paper focuses on how countries made changes to the configuration of federalism during the first wave of the pandemic. These changes typically have...

This paper empirically studies the impact of decentralization on foreign aid effectiveness. For this purpose, we examine a commonly used empirical growth model, considering aid modality as well as different measures of political and fiscal decentralization. Our panel estimations reveal that...

Following the ambiguous results in the literature aimed at understanding the empirical link between fiscal federalism and economic growth, this paper revisits the question using a Bayesian Model Averaging approach. The analysis suggests that the failure to appropriately account for model...

Adding to the literature on the effects of government decentralization, this paper uses a large sample of individual responses from more than a hundred countries about public's perceptions of government's performance along various dimensions to study the relative influences of different types of...

Recently Germany experienced yet another federal reform shortly after a previous modification to the German federal system. This paper explains agenda setting, negotiations and ratification of this recent federal reform. With regards to the case of the most recent federal reform in Germany the...

This paper empirically studies the impact of decentralization on foreign aid effectiveness. For this purpose, we examine a commonly used empirical growth model, considering aid modality as well as different measures of political and fiscal decentralization. Our panel estimations reveal that...

In many countries occur problems from unfunded mandates related to a shift of a function by an upper tier of government to lower rank governments without providing the lower one with financial means to perform these functions. The authors define the unfunded mandates and clarify how they relate...