Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have all carried-out comprehensive reforms of their inter-governmental fiscal systems in the decade since the inception of transition; and all three countries are in the process of considering or implementing far-reaching “second-generation” reforms in this...

Indonesia is engaged in an unprecedented major social and economic experiment in which much authority and responsibility for its governmental expenditures are being decentralized from the national government, largely to the local government level rather than the provincial government level. From...

El objetivo principal de este trabajo es examinar, comparar y extraer lecciones del proceso de descentralización en cuatro países latinoamericanos de pequeño tamaño. Varias lecciones se desprenden de este ejercicio. Primero, el proceso de descentralización puede ser virtualmente tan...

In spite of their long history and constitutional status, local governments in Bangladesh have a poor record of being an efficient, accountable and responsive provider of public services at local level. Over the decades, the local government system in Bangladesh has been “more an area of...

This report is about the fiscal performance of rural local governments in the state of West Bengal. Specifically, our goal is to develop a comprehensive fiscal information system for all rural local governments, and to use these data to valuate the intergovernmental finance structure in the...

Since Yemen’s reunification in 1990, decentralization reforms periodically resurface on the national political agenda. They seem to offer a positive way to address the major political and developmental challenges that the country is facing: to build a modern State in a tribal society, to...

The current process of decentralization in French-speaking West Africa is linked to the political changes that occurred in these countries in the early 1990s. Domestically, under pressure from people, the civil society and political parties seeking "freedom" and "democratic opening", as well as...

Lao People’s Democratic Republic is a small single-party State with an already long but erratic history of decentralization. Political drives towards decentralization and re-centralization have alternated for more than thirty years. Today, provincial governments enjoy a great deal of autonomy...