Among Polish cities facing socio-economic difficulties are the former regional capitals which lost their administrative status due to the 1998 reform, reducing the number of regions from 49 to 16. Making use of this quasiexperimental setting, we assess the impact of the loss of administrative...

This paper aims to analyze the impacts of a backup agreement contract on the performance of a small agricultural producers' citrus supply chain. A backup agreement contract, which ensures for each echelon that a quantity of products will be bought independently of real demand, is proposed to...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...

The issue of poor local government capacity has been considered one of the problems impeding the implementation of decentralization, especially in developing countries. This study addresses this issue in the case of Indonesia, a country that has implemented massive decentralization...

Every countrywide reform can always have specific opponents and fans as the changes make people leave their comfort zone. As an example, we have chosen a Ukrainian decentralization reform. Although this local self-government reform can be considered the most successful in our country, the...

This paper studies the equilibrium effects of local fiscal autonomy accounting for benefits from self-determination. It proposes a quantifiable structural equilibrium framework in which imperfectly mobile heterogeneous households sort themselves across jurisdictions under endogenous public good...

We investigate how changes in the administrative-territorial structure affect ethnic voting. We present an event study design that exploits the 2010 constitutional reform in Kenya, which substantially increased the number of primary administrative regions. We find (i) strong evidence for a...

Using information on collective agreements and administrative data on mental ill-health, sickness absence, and job separations, we study the effect of decentralization on well-being at work in Finland. Our regression results with individual-and firm-level fixed effects show that decentralized...

We compare health system responses to the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and Spain. In both countries, healthcare is managed at the regional level, but the central government behaved differently in the uncertainty surrounding the first wave, leaving more autonomy to regional...

What is decentralization, what is its underpinning rationale, and why might it matter for least-developed countries? This chapter has two goals: (i) to distill the enormous academic and policy literature on international experiences of decentralization into clear empirical conclusions; and (ii)...

This paper aims to examine whether the status of fiscal decentralization generates efficiency in local spending behavior and leads to local fiscal performance and local economic growth, revealing not only the status of Romania from the point of vertical fiscal imbalance but also the fiscal...

More than 25 years into the implementation of the Local Government Code of 1991, it is inconclusive whether fiscal decentralization indeed improves health service delivery in the Philippines. There is lack of studies that employ rigorous quantitative approach to address the research issue at...

I analyze the effects of ethnic divisions on the provision of public goods. Using OpenStreetMap data, I construct a new global dataset of locations of public amenities, such as schools, hospital and libraries. I allow for the possibility that the data may be systematically incomplete using two...

With the introduction of the economic reforms in the late 1980s, the opening up of the political arena and the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the decentralization process began in Mozambique. Different research developed in recent years shows that, as is the case in other countries in...

Due to the national importance of metropolitan areas, central governments seek to make them as attractive and competitive as possible. In many cases, this is done through state control over metropolitan areas and their governance arrangements. This article examines the relationship between state...

We 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-80s were followed by federalization,...

A rigorous understanding of the developmental effect of fiscal transfers to subnational governments remains an important policy research issue globally. This paper exploits a novel dataset of 20 years of municipal poverty maps and local public finances to study the effects on local welfare of a...

This chapter discusses infrastructure development in the Philippines under decentralization using illustrations mainly in the water sector. It opens up a study of the constraints and challenges in governance and regulation that local government units (LGUs) face in narrowing down the...

Looking at the decentralized provision of public education in a middle-income country, this paper estimates the impact of local autonomy on service quality, finding large heterogeneity in the effect across different levels of local development. In the year 2002, Colombian municipalities were...

Starting in 2001 the Government of Indonesia employed the Regional Autonomy Law, providing larger fiscal role to the province and district governments. However, our understanding of its impacts on development in Indonesia is still limited. This paper seeks to find the relationship between...