This study examines the impact of political decentralization on an essential public service provided in almost all countries: childhood immunization. The relationship is examined empirically using a time-series data set of 140 low- and middle-income countries from 1980 to 1997. The study finds that decentralization has different effects in low- and middle-income countries. In the low-income gro...

The district health system in Ghana today is characterized by high resource-uncertainty and narrow decision-space. This article builds a theory-driven historical case study to describe the influence of path-dependent administrative, fiscal and political decentralization processes on development of the district health system and district manager decision-space. Methods included a non-exhaustive ...

During the past half a century, by subscribing to various variants of central planning paradigms of development, developing countries, by and large, followed a path of centralization and as a result, they are more centralized today than industrialized countries were in their early stages of development (Boadway, Roberts and Shah, 1994). A number of recent developments, discussed below, are prom...

Many countries throughout the world are undertaking some forms of decentralization by shifting fiscal, political, and administrative responsibilities to lower levels of government. Decentralization is driven by unique circumstances in each setting. In some countries it is linked to recent democratization, while in others it is spurred by the failure of central government to deliver basic public...

This paper explores the idea that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by employing a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a principal component analysis, seven aspects of both federalism and decentralization are used as variables for explaining differences in (1) fiscal policy, (2) governmen...

The Impact of Local Decentralization on Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Counties We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose governments per...

Brazil is the most decentralized country in the developing world. It has a long history of federalism and decentralization, and has become considerably more decentralized over the last two decades. By 1995, state and local governments together accounted for nearly 60 percent of public consumption (Ter-Minassian, 1997: 438). In comparison with other developing countries, the Brazilian states als...

The Philippines is one of several Asian countries that has decentralized the provision of health care to its local governments in recent decades. In the context of decentralization, a few studies have previously examined the issue of fiscal competition among local governments in the developing world. This report presents a summary of a published study that examined the existence of inter-jurisd...

We present a dynamic two-region model with overlapping generations. There are two types of productive public expenditure, education and infrastructure funding, and governments decide optimally on budget size (tax rate) and its allocation across the two outlays. Productivity of government infrastructure spending can differ across regions. This assumption follows well established empirical eviden...