Government Fragmentation and Economic Growth

Decentralizing Development: Evidence from Government Splits

“…2 Building on the seminal works of Tiebout (1956) and Oates (1972), Alesina and Spolaore (2005) summarize the main trade-offs of smaller government units: The costs of losing scale and resources to provide public goods may be counterbalanced by the benefits of more homogeneous units and local power. Our contribution to empirical evidence on the actual consequences of redistricting is threefold (Grossman et al, 2017;Lima and Silveira Neto, 2018;Cassidy and Velayudhan, 2022;Cohen, 2022;Narasimhan and Weaver, 2022). First, rather than leveraging cross-country or cross-sectional variations, we overcome the endogeneity of redistricting by proposing two complementary quasi-experimental approaches that generate qualitatively similar results.…”

Decentralization, Ethnic Fractionalization, and Public Services: Evidence from Kenyan Healthcare

“…4 Beyond public service delivery, Frey and Stutzer (2000) and Flèche (2021) show that more local political decision making increases citizens' utility in Switzerland, while Traviss and Velayudhan (2023) find negative effects of decentralization on economic growth in Indonesia.…”