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Decentralization and Corruption: New Cross-Country Evidence

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TLDR
In this article, the authors attempt to improve the understanding and measurement of decentralization and its relationship with corruption in a worldwide context by presenting the conceptual underpinnings of such a relationship and using more defensible measures of both decentralization in its various dimensions as well as corruption for a sample of 158 countries.
Abstract
We attempt to improve the understanding and measurement of decentralization and its relationship with corruption in a worldwide context. This is done by presenting the conceptual underpinnings of such a relationship as well as using more defensible measures of both decentralization in its various dimensions as well as corruption for a sample of 158 countries. It is the first paper that treats various tiers of local governments (below the intermediate order of government) as the unit of comparative analysis. By pursuing rigorous econometric analysis we demonstrate that decentralization, when properly measured to mean moving government closer to people by empowering local governments, is shown to have a significant negative effect on the incidence of corruption regardless of the choice of the estimation procedures or the measures of corruption used. In terms of various dimensions of decentralized local governance, political decentralization matters even when we control for fiscal decentralization. Further v...

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

The Impact of Fiscal Decentralization: A Survey.

TL;DR: A comprehensive and updated review of the impact of decentralization on the economy, society and politics can be found in this article, where the authors discuss the main findings in the existing literature on the effects of decentralisation on a relevant list of socioeconomic variables.
Posted Content

How Close is Your Government to its People? Worldwide Indicators on Localization and Decentralization

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide an assessment of the impact of the silent revolution of the last three decades on moving governments closer to people to establish fair, accountable, incorruptible and responsive governance.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Impact of Fiscal Decentralization: A Survey

TL;DR: A comprehensive and updated review of the impact of decentralization on the economy, society and politics can be found in this paper, where the authors discuss the main findings in the existing literature on the effects of decentralisation on a relevant list of socioeconomic variables.
Journal ArticleDOI

Fiscal Transparency: (Why) does your local government respond?

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on one dimension of quality of governance: fiscal transparency and find that political competition and decentralization are two of the most important determinants of fiscal transparency.
Journal ArticleDOI

Decentralization and economic growth reconsidered: The role of regional authority:

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the connection between fiscal decentralization and economic growth within an institutional void, and found that the relationship between decentralisation and economic performance was not linear.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

The causes of corruption: a cross-national study

TL;DR: The authors analyzed several indexes of perceived corruption compiled from business risk surveys for the 1980s and 1990s and found that countries with Protestant traditions, histories of British rule, more developed economies, and (probably) higher imports were less corrupt.
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The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development

TL;DR: This article studied how limited government arose in the developed West, focusing on the critical role of federalism for protecting markets in both England and the United States, and showed that federalism underpins the spectacular economic growth in China over the past 15 years.
Journal ArticleDOI

Inference with Difference-in-Differences and Other Panel Data

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that standard asymptotics based on the number of groups going to infinity provide a poor approximation to the finite sample distribution and propose simple two-step estimators for these cases.
Posted Content

Decentralization and Corruption: Evidence across Countries

TL;DR: Fisman and Gatti as mentioned in this paper examined the relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties, and found that the origin of a country's legal system performs extremely well as an instrument for decentralization.
Journal ArticleDOI

Decentralization and Corruption : Evidence across Countries

TL;DR: The relationship between decentralization of government activities and the extent of rent extraction by private parties is examined empirically by looking at the cross-country relationship between fiscal decentralization and corruption as measured by a number of different indices.
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