Decentralization Task Force Meeting, New York City 2001

Pranab K. Bardhan

These notes cover some of the debate on decentralization’s implications for corruption and especially the potential for capture of local administrations by elites.

Tim Besley

These notes on decentralization lay out some of the basic issues and develops a simple map which puts the experiences and proposals of particular countries into a common conceptual framework.

Robin Burgess

These notes examine the economic and institutional arguments for decentralization as a means of identifying the conditions under which decentralization may or may not be successful. Burgess then offers some thoughts on how empirical evaluation of decentralization episodes can be improved and refined.

Jean-Paul Faguet

This paper describes a simple, two-stage model of local government which deals with multi-dimensional policy space in a straightforward way. It also identifies the incorporation of civil society into the local governance process as one of the keys to effective government.

Justin Y. Lin

This paper explores how fiscal decentralization was an important aspect of China’s multi-faceted reform.

Kathleen O’Neill

This paper adds empirical results from Latin America’s policy experiments to the current debates and sketches a few preliminary conclusions regarding both fiscal federalism and democratic practice.

Rohini Pande

This paper covers the two main aspects of political decentralization in India namely: (i) local accountability via village level elected institutions, and (ii) representation for women and other disadvantaged groups.

Yingyi Qian

This essay argues that appropriate assessment of the role of decentralization in China requires careful analysis. It shows a complexity of the relationship between micro incentives for local business development and macro stability for the whole economy.

Decentralization has become one of the hot topics of our time. It is squarely in the forefront of the development debate throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. And under the guises of subsidiarity, devolution and federalism it is also at the center of public policy-making in Europe and North America. And yet despite real experiments in decentralization under way in scores of countries, and literally hundreds of empirical studies, the economic and political effects of decentralization are still unclear.IPD’s overview chapter on decentralization examines all angles of this debate in an accessible and policy-relevant manner.

Mariano Tommasi

These notes focus on the revenue side of fiscal federalism (tax assignments), intergovernmental transfers, and intergovernmental relations more generally.

Barry R. Weingast

In order understand the comparative theory of federal performance, Barry Weingast develops a set of conditions that help differentiate among federal systems.These conditions serve a second purpose: the theory of fiscal federalism provides a set of systematic insights into the performance of federal systems. What follows can also be thought of as an attempt to make explicit some of the political assumptions underlying this theory.