Decentralization Examined

Madagascar Decentralization

Political Decentralization

I provide a critical overview of the literature on political decentralization. After reviewing firstand second-generation theories of federalism, I describe recent empirical studies focusing mainly on determinants of capture and local government accountability emphasized by second-generation theories. The article concludes by describing emerging new issues that deserve more attention in future ...

Disaster and Decentralization

This paper studies the effect of fiscal and political decentralization on the death toll by disasters for up to 46 developing and transitional economies from 1974 to 2004. The results show that elected government at the local level does not help mitigate disaster risk. This study underscores the importance of the joint effects of different forms of decentralization and shows that when political...

Decentralization : Conceptualization and Measurement

Aaron Schneider is a political scientist at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. His research interests include comparative politics, public finance, and methodology. His current research projects include studies of federalism, decentralization, party systems, budgeting, and taxation. He has conducted research in Brazil and India, and plans to apply the measures der...

Decentralization Meets Quantization

Optimizing distributed learning systems is an art of balancing between computation and communication. There have been two lines of research that try to deal with slower networks: quantization for low bandwidth networks, and decentralization for high latency networks. In this paper, we explore a natural question: can the combination of both decentralization and quantization lead to a system that...