Decentralization, corruption, and political accountability in developing countries

Oskar Nupia

No 4013, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: Powerful local elites are quite common in developing countries. Thus, whether decentralization reduces or not the level of corruption in the presence of these elites is a relevant issue for these economies. We motivate this paper with some empirical evidence. Using cross-country information we find that the negative average effect of decentralization on corruption documented in the literature is absent for developing countries. Then, we build an imperfect information model of corruption and political accountability to study if the influence local elites may have on the allocation of public resources can explain this outcome. We find that not only the power of the elites but also other unexpected factors matter. In particular, both the existence of regions with a relatively weak accountability sector and the design of decentralization and grants can also explain the lack of success of decentralization in combating corruption in these economies.

Keywords: Decentralization; corruption; political accountability; capture; localelites (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 H72 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2007-09-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8110/dcede2007-17.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:col:000089:004013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Universidad De Los Andes-Cede ().