Fiscal decentralization and infant mortality: empirical evidence from r ural India
Abay Asfaw*,
Klaus Frohberg,
James Ks and
Johannes Jütting ()
Journal of Developing Areas, 2007, vol. 41, issue 1, 17-35
Abstract:
Over the last two decades, many countries around the world have been enthusiastically embarking on the path of decentralization. However, because of a preconceived idea that decentralization will automatically result in efficient allocation of public resources and due to the absence of an analytical framework and data, very little empirical work has been done in this area. Nor has much attention been given to an analysis of the factors enabling or constraining its outcomes. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model and use it to test empirically the impact of fiscal decentralization on rural infant mortality rates in India between 1990 and 1997. The random effect regression results show that fiscal decentralization plays a statistically significant role in reducing rural infant mortality rate and the results are robust. The results also show that the effectiveness of fiscal decentralization can be affected by other complementary factors such as the level of political decentralization.
Keywords: Fiscal Decentralization; Political decentralization; health outcomes; India; Panchayats (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C51 I18 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)
Downloads: (external link)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jda/summary/v041/41.1asfaw.html
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:jda:journl:vol.41:year:2007:issue1:pp:17-35
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Journal of Developing Areas from Tennessee State University, College of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Abu N.M. Wahid ().