Decentralization has been advocated by donors and development agencies as an important factor broadening citizen participation and improving local governance, thereby, promoting poverty reduction from the bottom up. On the basis of a comprehensive review of 19 country case studies documented in...

Donor agencies and policy makers tend to agree that increased access of women to education, health, credit, formal legal rights and employment opportunities, in conjunction with economic growth, will substantially improve the socio-economic role of women in developing countries. This paper...

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls on countries to report on an extensive set of indicators, aimed at ensuring that no one is 'left behind', yet today, nearly halfway towards the end, most countries are struggling to produce the required data. The COVID-19 pandemic, climate...

This paper analyzes the impact of trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) on drug prices in seven middle income countries. Applying both an econometric as well as an explorative analysis we find three key messages: First, the introduction of TRIPS in the selected countries tends to...

Summary This study analyzes the effect of fiscal decentralization on health outcomes in China using a panel data set with nationwide county-level fiscal data. We find that more fiscally decentralized provinces have lower infant mortality rates than provinces that are the main spending authority,...

This study analyzes the effect of fiscal decentralization on health outcomes in China using a panel data set with nationwide county-level data. We find that counties in more fiscal decentralized provinces have lower infant mortality rates compared with those counties in which the provincial...