Fiscal decentralization has been a fundamental aspect of China’s transition to a market economy, and the country has made substantial effort to break down its highly centralized fiscal management system with various forms of fiscal contracting systems (1978-1993) and later a tax sharing system (1994present). This paper is aimed to provide a comprehensive review of China’s experience in fiscal d...

The fiscal decentralization impulse now sweeping the world often leads to partial decentralization, where subnational governments are funded by central transfers, rather than leading to full local autonomy. Despite the practical important of this arrangement, the literature contains no economic analysis of a partial decentralization regime in a Tiebout-style model. This paper provides such an a...

The typical post-Bretton Woods era development growth, and public sector size. But decentralization is approach that emphasized central government-led surprisingly difficult to measure. Nearly all cases development efforts has changed dramatically, and local examining the relationship between decentralization and governments have clearly emerged as players in macroeconomic performance have reli...

Article history: Received 18 August 2009 Received in revised form 9 February 2011 Accepted 19 March 2011 Available online 13 April 2011 No consensus has yet emerged on whether fiscal decentralization facilitates or impedes the growth of the public sector. One explanation for this ambiguity in the literature is that the effect of fiscal decentralization on public sector size depends on the gover...

This paper surveys recent contributions to the study of fiscal decentralization which adopt a political economy approach. It is argued that this approach can capture, in a variety of formal models, the plausible and influential ideas (increasingly, supported by empirical evidence) that fiscal decentralization can lead to improved preference-matching and accountability of government. In particul...

An important piece of the major fiscal and structural reforms undertaken in Argentina in the early 1990’s was the decentralization of education services from the federal government to the provincial governments. The theoretical literature does not find absolute superiority of centralization or decentralization in the provision of public services. We evaluate empirically the effect of the decent...

The international integration of markets and the decentralization of authority within nation states are two defining trends of the contemporary era. A popular speculation is that globalization has caused a downward shift in the locus of governance by reducing the economic costs of smallness and allowing localities and regions with distinctive preferences to pursue their own political and econom...

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...

There has been a resurgence of interest, in many parts of the world, in problems of multi-level government finance. Recent and ongoing political and economic developments raise questions about the role of the nation, subnational governments, and supranational public authorities in the provision and financing of public-sector programs. This paper presents a selective survey of some of these deve...

The typical post-Bretton-Woods era development approach that put much emphasis on central government-led development efforts has changed dramatically, and local governments have now clearly emerged as players in development policy. Now, the thinking about what is important to achieve development objectives is changing and fiscal decentralization reforms are now being pursued by many countries a...