Abstract The paper analyzes the effects of land reform on social development –poverty and land distribution- at the local level. Land reform in Colombia, understood as the allocation of public land to peasant, has granted 23 million hectares which comprises around 20% of Colombian territory...

The paper analyzes the effects of land reform on social development –poverty and land distribution- at the local level. Land reform in Colombia, understood as the allocation of public land to peasant, has granted 23 million hectares which comprises around 20% of Colombian territory and about...

Ethiopia, like most developing countries, has opted to deliver services such as basic education, primary health care, agricultural extension advice, water, and rural roads through a highly decentralized system (Manor 1999; Treisman 2007). That choice is based on several decades of theoretical...

We review empirical evidence on the ability of decentralization to enhance preference matching and technical efficiency in the provision of health and education in developing countries. Many influential surveys have found that the empirical evidence of decentralization's effects on service...

The authors explore the effects of decentralization on education and health in Ethiopia using an original database covering all of the country’s regions and woredas (local governments). Ethiopia is a remarkable case in which war, famine and chaos in the 1970s-1980s were followed by...

Decentralization is meant to improve access to public services, but relatively few studies examine this question empirically. We explore the effects of decentralization on access to health and education in Colombia using an original database covering over 95 % of Colombian municipalities. We...

Summary The effects of decentralization on public sector outputs are much debated but little agreed upon. This paper compares the remarkable case of Bolivia with the more complex case of Colombia to explore decentralization's effects on public education outcomes. In Colombia, decentralization of...