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A fundamental restructuring of intergovernmental relations involving decentralisation and expanded autonomy for provincial and local governments is under way in Indonesia. This paper explores the intergovernmental financial system that preceded the new General Allocation Fund (DAU), with particular attention to the old Inpres development grants. Like Inpres, the DAU attempts to address national development objectives, and can be seen as a logical consequence of reform efforts in intergovernmental finance that began long before the demise of the New Order government in 1998. The use of earmarked Inpres grants enabled the central government to ensure that key sectors such as roads, public health and education received adequate attention throughout Indonesia's diverse regions. Local governments' experience with Inpres should help in implementation of the DAU, yet Law 25/1999—which restructures fiscal relations between the various levels of government—may actually have increased local reliance on the central government.

The transition from Asian ®nancial crisis into employment and income loss is analyzed in details by using a structural path analysis (SPA) and a price endogenous model of computable general equilibrium (CGE) type. Indonesia is taken as a case study. It is revealed that the damage in the real sector has ripple e¨ects on the services sector, reducing the demand for workers of the professional rural and urban category, the growing middle class of the country. In turn, the overall income of most high urban household declines. The depressed manufacturing and construction sector gravely injures the companies' ®nancial position. For some sectors, the indirect transmission of the e¨ects is not insigni®cant. The large drop of employment in rural professionals suggests that the rural non-farm activities are likely to receive a recession contagion from the urban-based economy. This also implies that there is no alternative outlet in the rural areas for the urban middle class who lost their jobs. Very likely, some of them will end up working in the informal sector. The CGE simulation also suggests that the real wages have declined, especially in the urban areas. The per-capita consumption of all urban workers drops, the largest decline of which is for the urban medium type. In general, therefore, the relative position of the urban sector deteriorates more than that in the rural area. Hence, the country has to be prepared to face a massive increase in urban poverty, a fertile ground for internal con¯icts and social discontent.

The economics of decentralization implies that it generates efficiency improvement (higher growth) due to local government's ability to respond to the needs of local communities. However, this is not always the case. While policies do matter, this paper argues that institutional factors hold the key to the problem. The interactions among these factors and the characteristics of leaders in the region determine the outcome of decentralization. By capturing these important properties, multiple equilibria can be generated, avowing the ambiguous effects of local capture. On this basis, a typology of local leaders is developed. To the extent that welfare-enhancing activities are often related to regional growth, the role of an incentive system in determining the local leaders' behavior is also analyzed. In essence, a lack of incentive mechanisms for local leaders to promote growth and the absence of a stick-and-carrot system explain why post-decentralization growth performance has been generally disappointing.

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