Bulletin n. 1/2007
June 2007
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Barankay Iwan, Lockwood Ben
    Decentralization and the productive efficiency of government: Evidence from Swiss cantons
    in Journal of Public Economics , Volume: 91, Issue: 5-6 ,  2007 ,  1197-1218
    Advocates of fiscal decentralization argue that among other benefits, it can increase the efficiency of delivery of government services. This paper is one of the first to evaluate this claim empirically by looking at the association between expenditure decentralization and the productive efficiency of government using a data set of Swiss cantons. We first provide careful evidence that expenditure decentralization is a powerful proxy for legal local autonomy. Further panel regressions of Swiss cantons provide robust evidence that more decentralization is associated with higher educational attainment. We also show that these gains lead to no adverse effects across education types but that male students benefited more from educational decentralization closing, for the Swiss case, the gender education gap.
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