Why So Much Centralization? A Model of Primitive Centripetal Accumulation

Jean-Paul Faguet

STICERD - Development Economics Papers - From 2008 this series has been superseded by Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE

Abstract: With strong conceptual arguments in its favor, decentralization is a popular and growing policy trend across the world. And yet dozens of empirical studies have failed to find convincing evidence that past reforms have worked. This begs two questions: 1)Why does decentralization produce indifferent results? and 2) Why is there so much centralization in the first place? The paper develops a simple model of a legislature in which municipal representatives bargain with central government agents over the allocation of public resources. By locating central government in a particular geographic space ¿ the ¿capital¿ ¿ and invoking self-interest on the part of its residents, I can answer both questions. I introduce the concept of residual power, which underpins the model and determines the flow of resources to districts. There is so much centralization because residual power is located in the capital, whose residents directly benefit from weak local governments.

Keywords: Centralization; decentralization; local public goods; local government; municipal government; legislative bargaining; capture. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-geo and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/de/dedps43.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:stidep:43

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in STICERD - Development Economics Papers - From 2008 this series has been superseded by Economic Organisation and Public Policy Discussion Papers from Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (sticerd@lse.ac.uk).