 Coordination in heterogeneous federal systemsJournal of Public Economics, 2011, vol. 95, issue 7, 900-912 Abstract: We compare centralized and decentralized policy making in a federation in which policy heterogeneity is inherently costly and preferences vary across jurisdictions: all jurisdictions agree that some harmonization is desirable but no one agrees on the direction of harmonization. This type of collective choice problem arises when members of a federal system have to coordinate nonbudgetary policies such as laws, regulations, standards, or diplomatic policies. Contrary to the common wisdom, decentralization becomes optimal when coordination becomes very important. When coordination costs are symmetric, decentralization dominates centralization irrespective of the magnitude of externalities and the heterogeneity of preferences. In the case of discontinuous network effects, standardization never Pareto dominates decentralization. Keywords: Federalism; Decentralization; Coordination; Externality; Reciprocality; Harmonization; Law; Regulation (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:eee:pubeco:v:95:y:2011:i:7:p:900-912 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2011.01.010 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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