Across the developing world, many governments have implemented political reforms—heavily promoted by international donors—designed to transfer greater power to subnational levels of government and to provide a more substantial policymaking and oversight role to citizens. Although economic analyses have frequently argued that such decentralization programs improve the efficiency of public expend...

State cooperation with international institutions requires support from subnational constituencies. We argue that citizens often approve of abstract, foreign actions by institutions, yet disapprove of specific, local actions. We argue this aversion is greatest for citizens in closest “proximity” to institutional actions. We assess these arguments with a survey experiment about the International...

A key feature in the current debate about governance in the European Union (EU) is the proposition that traditional forms of government, based upon distinctive and separate layers or tiers of responsibility at the supra national, national and sub-national levels, are too rigid and fail to take account of the interdependence and overlapping competencies of different spheres. At the subnational l...

The new Constitution of Nepal established a federal system governance in 2015. Implementation began 2018 following the 2017 subnational elections. is comprised seven provinces and 753 local governments. constitution assigns important functional responsibilities to provincial governments mandates that they have significant autonomy deciding how services will be delivered. Subnational accounted f...

This paper surveys the state of fiscal federalism in India, in the broader context of decentralization. We begin with an overview of the basic features and recent developments in intergovernmental fiscal relations, including the role of political institutions, the specifics of legislative and budgetary autonomy, assignments of expenditure responsibility and revenue authority, revenue collection...

The traditional theory of fiscal federalism prescribes a very limited tax base for subnational governments. The only good local taxes are said to be those that are easy to administer locally, are imposed solely (or mainly) on local residents, and do not raise problems of harmonization or competition between subnational – local or regional governments or between subnational and national governme...

BACKGROUND Hypertension is a global public health challenge. National prevalence estimates can conceal important differences in prevalence in subnational areas. This paper aims to develop a consistent set of national and subnational estimates of the prevalence of hypertension in a country with limited data for subnational areas. METHODS A nationally representative cross-sectional Survey of Li...

OBJECTIVES A better understanding of the subnational variations could be paramount to the efficiency and effectiveness of the response to the HIV epidemic. The purpose of this study is to describe the methodology used to produce the first estimates at second subnational level released by UNAIDS. METHODS We selected national population-based surveys with HIV testing and survey clusters geoloca...

This article sets the stage for a special issue that examines interplay between subnational and supranational governance. It begins by discussing how territorial architecture of government has become more multilevel as national governments have shifted authority both downwards to upwards international institutions. Next, we argue this structure emanates from tension drive reap functional benefi...