Excessive borrowing by subnational governments due to soft budget constraints and intergovernmental coordination failures might be one of the perils of decentralization. Despite a large body of case studies, empirical investigations on whether decentralization increases consolidated public debt levels are still scarce. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring econometrically for se...

E very health system has to make decisions about how to use limited resources to meet competing claims about diverse health needs. In all systems, national priority setting, including budgeting, generally imposes constraints on other levels of decision-making be it in states or provinces, districts or cities, or local health authorities, hospitals, or health insurance plans. Decisions at any of...

The views presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the INTRODUCTION Donor and development organizations have prescribed decentralization to promote accountability and transparency, public participation in policy making and democratization. The donor agency and development administration literature considers the types of decentralization, the dyn...

Background: The Ugandan Government has aimed at creating a needs-based and cost-effective health care system. The means to carry out this aim have been 1) a decentralization of the health sector in order to increase lower-level responsibility, accountability, and participation, and 2) a strong national policy formulation capacity, facilitating needs assessment and cost-effective prioritization....

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the recent impact of fiscal decentralization in Europe on total expenditure for specific government functions as well as on total government size. A panel dataset for the years 2000 to 2009 for European countries has been constructed from EUROSTAT data. The effects of decentralization interact with the degree of vertical imbalances and tend to be neg...

— 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, if certain conditions are met. Key among those conditions are the county governments’ own fiscal capacity ...

In this article, we empirically analyze the impact of central and subnational government spending on human development in a sample 57 developed developing countries over period 2000–18. Specifically, focus effects health education public expenditure Human Development Index (HDI) its dimensions (life expectancy, education, income). Applying data panel analysis, our empirical evidence shows impor...