This paper deals with the effects of political decentralisation on economic growth in Spain, an issue that has generated heated debates in recent decades. Our analysis of the last three and a half decades, a period characterised by the weak narrowing of the income per capita gap within regions, does not offer conclusive results on convergence and points to the importance of alternative factors. Several proxies were used to capture the decentralisation process. We also studied some potential interactions between decentralisation and other variables. All in all, our empirical evidence shows robustly that transferring more responsibilities to subnational governments does not significantly affect growth in any sense.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.