Can decentralization help address poverty and social exclusion in Europe?

Vassilis Tselios and Andres Rodriguez-Pose

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Poverty reduction and the tackling of social exclusion are overarching goals of development and welfare policies. This paper explores the extent to which decentralization contributes to poverty and social exclusion alleviation in European countries and regions. We find evidence that increases in central government transfers of political, administrative and fiscal authority to subnational tiers of government reduce poverty and address social exclusion at the national level. This, however, mainly happens in countries with a high degree of governance quality and, fundamentally, in urban areas. The link between decentralization and poverty and social exclusion alleviation is more uniform at the regional level, as greater regional autonomy is connected to lower poverty and social exclusion, regardless of the quality of regional government. Hence, when regional governments have the capacity to design their own independent policies, a reduction of poverty and social exclusion and improvements in well-being generally ensue.

Keywords: decentralisation; poverty; social exclusion; quality of governance; urban areas; Europe; decentralization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 H53 I32 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2022-10-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-pbe and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Territory, Politics, Governance, 20, October, 2022. ISSN: 2162-2671

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115545/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:115545

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().