Ítem
Acceso Abierto
Partial decentralization as a safeguard against favoritism
Título de la revista
Autores
Cortés Cortés, Darwin
Fecha
2010-09
Directores
ISSN de la revista
Título del volumen
Editor
Universidad del Rosario
Citations
Métricas alternativas
Resumen
Abstract
In this paper I investigate the optimal level of decentralization of tasks for the provision of a local public good. I enrich the well-known trade-off between internalization of spillovers (that favors centralization) and accountability (that favors decentralization) by considering that public goods are produced through multiple tasks. This adds an additional institutional setting, partial decentralization, to the classical choice between full decentralization and full centralization. The main results are that partial decentralization is optimal when both the variance of exogenous shocks to electorate’s utility is large and the electorate expects high performance from politicians. I also show that the optimal institutional setting depends on the degree of substitutability / complementarity between tasks. In particular, I show that a large degree of substitutability between tasks makes favoritism more likely, which increases the desirability of partial decentralization as a safeguard against favoritism.
Palabras clave
Keywords
Accountability , Multitask , Internalization of spillovers , Substitution
Citations
Cortés Cortés, D. F. (2010). Partial decentralization as a safeguard against favoritism. Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario, Facultad de Economía.
