In the presence of spillovers, decentralized provision of local public goods may lead to a higher surplus than centralized provision even though localities have identical preferences. Indeed, free-riding costs associated to decentralization can be lower than the costs of rent-seeking and influence activities under centralization. Actually, centralization yields a higher level of regional surplu...

This paper studies the impact of deployment centralization on teachers’ effort and student achievement by exploring the reforms of rural education system in China. As regular teachers’ payroll was moved from xiang (or school district) up to county government in 2001, the power of deployment was gradually transferred along the same line. We exploit variations in transfer timing and use as compar...

One of the fundamental social and economic characteristics of the southern countries is the lack of development of spatial planning system whose symptom is the irregular expansion of urban settlements. Due to the ecological traits and national policy-making manner, this expansion has caused the centralization of regional metropolises in these countries. In the geographical spaces of Iran, speci...

The emergence of a modern state in Colombia and the centralization of political and administrative power in Bogotá began to take shape during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The state had a central role within the overarching modernisation discourse that sought to create a common national identity. One of the tasks assigned to the state by the national project was that of implemen...

In this paper, we build a theoretical framework for quantitatively measuring and graphically representing the degrees of closeness centralization among performers assigned to enact a workflow procedure. The degree of closeness centralization of a workflow-performer reflects how near the performer is to the other performers in enacting a corresponding workflow model designed for workflow-support...

Fully decentralized algorithms for distributed constraint optimization often require excessive amounts of communication when applied to complex problems. The OptAPO algorithm of [Mailler and Lesser, 2004] uses a strategy of partial centralization to mitigate this problem. We introduce PC-DPOP, a new partial centralization technique, based on the DPOP algorithm of [Petcu and Faltings, 2005]. PCD...

The questions of centralization and decentralization arise in every polity. The constitution or the practice or both have to settle how much of policy making is to be decided by the central government and by component bodies. By and large liberalism and decentralization tend to go together while authoritarianism tends to be associated with centralization. The constitutional model which is gener...