Most US federal environmental policies allow states to assume responsibility for implementation and enforcement of regulations; states with this responsibility are referred to as “authorized” or having “primacy.” Although such decentralization may have benefits, it may also have costs...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...

We argue that a purpose of foreign aid is to whet the appetite of the recipient in order to bring about a long term commitment to what the donor perceives as a need, but which the recipient may rank lower down on his list of undertakings, or may be sufficiently resource constrained as to be...

This paper analyzes the decentralization of decision-making in aid-giving in a theoretical rent-seeking framework. In this analysis the root donor establishes a necessary criterion for potential recipients: good governance. The potential recipients compete in hierarchal contests for funds. The...

Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction...

A commonly alleged pitfall of decentralization is that poverty, socio-economic inequality and lack of political competition allow local elites to capture local governments. This hypothesis is empirically examined using a longitudinal sample of 80 West Bengal villages concerning targeting of...

A common presumption is that decentralization is prone to a potential pitfall owing to the greater vulnerability of local governments to capture by local elites. We investigate the determinants of relative capture of local and national governments theoretically, in the context of an extended...