 Political DecentralizationAnnual Review of Economics, 2015, vol. 7, issue 1, 231-249 Abstract: I provide a critical overview of the literature on political decentralization. After reviewing first- and second-generation theories of federalism, I describe recent empirical studies focusing mainly on determinants of capture and local government accountability emphasized by second-generation theories. The article concludes by describing emerging new issues that deserve more attention in future research: a wider range of political distortions beyond capture and corruption; effects of decentralization on intercommunity allocations, learning, and experimentation, and on democracy itself; a comparison of decentralization with other organizational alternatives; and issues pertaining to design and implementation raised by first-generation federalism theories, such as interjurisdictional spillovers, vertical fiscal relations, the range of devolution, and the political economy of implementation. Keywords: accountability; capture; corruption; democracy; devolution; federalism (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reveco:v:7:y:2015:p:231-249 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article More articles in Annual Review of Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA. |
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