Economic reform has resulted in considerable decentralization and exceptional economic growth in China. It has however posed a serious contradiction for China’s environmental protection efforts. This study empirically investigated the environmental effects of market and power decentralization using data on industrial SO2 emission and dusts at the city level. It is found that China’s industrial ...

Prior research considers the IT governance decision to be a trade-off between the cost-efficiency of centralized information processing, and the responsiveness provided by local information processing. Environmental uncertainty plays a major role in this trade-off. In uncertain environments, the need for local information processing dominates the cost-efficiency available from centralization, l...

BACKGROUND Within the decentralization framework of Government, the Ministry of Health (MoH) Nepal initiated the decentralization of primary care services closer to citizens. This paper aims to examine and understand the effect of decentralization at the district health service from the perspectives of service users and providers. METHODS Using non-probability purposive sampling, we conducted...

We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters to local plant managers in almost 4,000 firms in the US, Europe and Asia. We find Anglo-Saxon and No...

The purpose of this study is to explore the link between decentralization and the impact of natural disasters through empirical analysis. It addresses the issue of the importance of the role of local government in disaster response through different means of decentralization. By studying data available for 50 countries, it allows to develop the knowledge on the role of national government in se...

Decentralization has long been advocated as a desirable process for improving health systems. Nevertheless, we still lack a sufficient analytical framework for systematically studying how decentralization can achieve this objective. We do not have adequate means of analyzing the three key elements of decentralization: (1) the amount of choice that is transferred from central institutions to ins...

National governments in almost all developing countries have begun to decentralize policies and decision making related to development, public services, and the environment. Existing research on the subject has enhanced our understanding of the effects of decentralization and thereby has been an effective instrument in the advocacy of decentralization. But most analyses, especially where enviro...

We argue that decentralization is particularly beneficial to firm performance in “bad times”. We present a model where bad times increase the importance of rapid action, and improve the alignment of incentives of managers within firms. We test this idea exploiting the 2008-2009 Great Recession using firm-level cross country panel data combined with our survey data on firm organization. We find ...

A ll around the world in matters of governance, decentralization is the rage. Even apart from the widely debated issues of subsidiarity and devolution in the European Union and states’ rights in the United States, decentralization has been at the center stage of policy experiments in the last two decades in a large number of developing and transition economies in Latin America, Africa and Asia....