This paper analyzes which of various plausible determinants are significantly related to an index of "perceived corruption" compiled from business risk surveys for the mid-1990s. Using 2SLS to reduce problems of endogeneity and a variation of Leamer's "extreme bounds analysis" to test for robustness, it finds three factors robustly significant. Countries that were more economically developed and those which are former British colonies were rated "less corrupt". Those which have a federal structure were "more corrupt". Daniel Treisman Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of California, Los Angeles 4289 Bunche Hall LA CA 90095-1472 Treisman@polisci.ucla.edu First Draft September 1997 Revised April 1998 ####

THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS and illustrates the use of a standard simple economic framework for the evaluation of policies on population and reproductive health services and contrasts this framework with current discussions of several issues in these fields. There is a long tradition of economic analysis in the population and reproductive health fields. Nevertheless, a number of current policy discussions could benefit from some realignment to become more consistent with the broader field of human resource policy analysis. We think that there are two gains from such a realignment. First, the use of the standard economic framework for policy analysis would facilitate communication between analysts and policymakers working in the population and reproductive health community and economists and policymakers not working in these fields who are unfamiliar with the way policy issues are conceptualized by population and reproductive health sector specialists. Improving this communication is important because of ongoing policy discussions related to the extent to which scarce public resources

This paper examines average annual inflation rates in a panel of 87 countries in the 1970s and 80s. It finds a sharp divergence between developed countries---where decentralization correlates with lower inflation---and developing countries---where it correlates with higher inflation. Empirical analysis suggests that decentralization helps preserve central bank independence in OECD countries, while in non-OECD countries it increases pressures on the government to overspend and get the central bank to monetize the deficit. In developing countries, decentralization of tax authority also seems to reduce imports, thus reducing the political cost to central government of inflationinduced currency depreciation. Daniel Treisman Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of California, Los Angeles 4289 Bunche Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472 Treisman@polisci.ucla.edu June 1998 Draft. Comments Welcome. I. INTRODUCTION Do political and fiscal decentralization make it easier or more difficult to control inflation? A policymaker faced with this question might be excused for feeling some confusion. While the pros and cons of decentralization are vigorously debated in countries around the world, little is known conclusively about its relationship to stable prices. Opposite arguments exist, based on different theoretical premises, supported by different empirical examples, and implying opposite predictions.

Abstract not found

Across the world, governments are dealing with the challenges raised by both globalization and a movement towards democratic systems of governance. 2 In an effort to make the delivery of services more efficient and to bring it closer to the people, many countries have moved to decentralize a range of activities. Over the past decade, a wave

this paper was presented at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC)-World Bank Institute Conference on "Decentralization and the Making of Sub-national Policy" at Bangalore on May 25, 1999.

Economic models of decentralization generally emphasize beneficial consequences—efficient provision of local public goods, hard budget constraints, and sorting of residents according to taste. This paper notes two less benign effects. First, political decentralization makes it easier for subnational governments to collude with enterprises at the center’s expense, offering firms political protection against central tax collectors and bankruptcy agents (“regional fiscal protection”). Second, because multiregional enterprises have a larger set of potential regional protectors, political decentralization advantages them over smaller, single-region firms (the “multiregional advantage”). Fiscal decentralization alleviates some problems, but exacerbates others such as the shift of output underground. A simple model shows how these and other phenomena follow from the assumption of revenue-maximizing governments in a state with inter-level revenue-sharing and imperfect law enforcement. Various predictions of the model are compared to recent economic experience in Russia and are found to fit remarkably well. Many problems—including official stagnation, booming underground economy, growing interregional fiscal inequality, economic dominance of the “oligarchs”, falling federal tax revenues, and frequent economic conflict between central and regional governments—that are often explained by ad hoc and personal factors (Yeltsin’s health, high-level corruption, misguided economic reform strategies) can all be traced at least in part to the logic of competition in a decentralizing, revenue-sharing state.

East Asia’s success at promoting economic growth and poverty reduction is well known. Since the early 1980s, sustained economic growth rates in the order of five percent have reduced poverty rates by half. But it is a clear fact of contemporary geopolitics that not all areas are equally well connected with newly expanding

ABSTRACT This paper examines the complexities involved in “enabling ” the provision of housing in developing countries. In conventional thinking the enabling strategy focuses on the ability of the private sector, specifically the “markets, ” to deliver housing. Enabling has been promoted as consisting of, primarily, decentralization, privatization, deregulation and demand-driven development. The focus of the policy prescriptions is to reduce the “damaging ” involvement of the State. This paper presents evidence from slum redevelopment programs in Mumbai, India, to demonstrate that enabling is likely to be much more complicated. Paradoxically, enabling housing provision through market mechanisms may require four levels of seeming policy contradictions- both decentralization and centralization; both privatization and public investment; both deregulation and new regulations, and both demand-driven and supply-driven development. In other words, enabling is likely to require a different type of State involvement, not necessarily less State involvement. A complex and more sophisticated role of the State is necessary to provide the institutional support for well functioning property markets, as well as to capture the opportunities high value property markets provide.

Federation implies the existence in one country of more than one level of gov ernment, each with different expenditure responsibilities and taxing powers. In the Nigeria context, this consists of a Federal gov ernment, 36 states, Federal Capital Territory and 774 Local