decentralisation

When Brazil let neglected districts break away and form new municipalities, peripheral areas gained services, jobs, and growth at no visible cost to the rest of the country.

China’s bureaucratic promotion system unintentionally incentivises local leaders to restrict trade and underinvest in cross-jurisdictional infrastructure with provincial peers, fragmenting the world’s largest domestic markets and undermining long-ter...

The creation of smaller local government polities resulted in greater public good access across multiple dimensions – village-level infrastructure, individually-targeted benefit programmes, and workfare programmes – over both the short and long run.

What do we know about the impacts of decentralised governance in developing countries?

Access to formal complaints technologies improves minorities’ strategic bargaining power within local government and improves public good provision

Decentralising the monitoring of public sector workers is cost-effective, but as central state capacity increases this advantage disappears

Redrawing subnational political boundaries potentially reduces interethnic tensions yet also can create new ethnic divisions that exacerbate conflict