Democratic decentralization or political consolidation: The case of local government reform in Karnataka

In 1987 the Indian State of Karnataka implemented panchayat reform legislation. The ideological orientation of the Janata Government's reforms is considered, together with the question of whether stronger local government in India increases the state's autonomy within the federation. The Karnataka reforms are expected to be significantly different from the reforms enacted in other states. Participation by marginalized groups may assist the Janata party in incorporating them into its network of patronage. Local level planning has been made more effective. The legislation gives the zilla parishad control over the line departments of the State Government. Administrative power is likely to experience increased local political direction. However the financial independence of the zilla parishad is by no means assured. The final outcome will also depend upon the attitude towards the reform of the Congress Party, anxious about its power base in the Karnataka countryside.     

Urban local government finance in Nigeria: The case of Onitsha local government

Onitsha, located along the route that connects south-western and south-eastern Nigeria, has a very financially dynamic local government. Over one-quarter of the total revenues of this local government come from its market and motor parks. This is an unusual source for a local government that has perhaps the largest per capita revenue in Nigeria—almost N40, compared with the national average of N4.9. The procedure for collecting this revenue is regarded as highly successful since there is greater reliance on the citizens than tax officials. The volume of revenues collected has allowed the council maintain a large surplus revenue over a long period of time, which enables it to carry out important programmes of primary and adult education. It is also beginning to develop its property revenue collection system in collaboration with the Anambra State government.     

New evidence on government efficiency

Government is generally not considered an efficient producer. Yet, conceptually, it is relatively simple to construct a system of incentives and controls that should lead to efficiency. The outcomes of over 1700 recent competitions between government producers and the private sector, conducted under OMB's Commercial Activity (CA) Program, provide new evidence. Analysis of the Navy's CA program outcomes demonstrates that the government is as efficient as the private supplier at least 21% of the time. The local incentives and controls that induce this outcome are not widespread, however. Less than half of the government managers selected an efficient mix of inputs without a competitive stimulus and an additional seven percent of the managers did not do so even then.     

Unnatural partners: coalescence in Israeli local government

ABSTRACT

A prominent finding in coalition formation literature is that the underlying political rationale at the subnational level largely follows that of the one revealed by the classic literature on national coalitions. The Israeli political system is extremely centralized, with a local government that is highly dependent on its national counterpart. One could expect such a setting to result in local party behaviour that closely resembles the national one. However, as we show, this is far from being the case. We analyze 34 municipal coalitions in the 17 largest Israeli cities. After establishing that Israeli municipal politics fly in the face of classical coalition formation theories, we turn to explain this discrepancy with a qualitative analysis of interviews with 5 formatuers and 8 councillors. We conclude that mayors face low costs of adding surplus coalition partners, while standing to gain from wider legitimacy, weaker opposition, and constrained future competition. At the same time, municipal lists have strong resource- and policy-related incentives to join the coalition while compromise is met with low political costs. The result is an overwhelming predominance of oversized coalitions and partnerships which would be highly improbable at the national arena.     

The consolidation of adjustment: Implications for public administration

The governments of most developing countries have been subject to pressures, especially through structural adjustment programmes, to reduce the direct role of the state in the supply of services. New forms of service supply are emerging, in which government has only an indirect role as enabler and regulator of other actors; but there has been little practical guidance on how these ‘new’ roles are to be performed in the specific context of developing countries. The danger is then of the adoption of inappropriate practices from more advanced countries. The argument of this article is that governments face several difficulties in managing the ‘post-adjusted state’: the inheritance of social and political strains, and of reforms made abruptly under pressure; the complexity of identifying the appropriate role of the state for particular services under particular circumstances; the technical difficulty of managing new administrative roles; and the contradiction, particularly in respect of systems of accountability, between the new and the old requirements on public administration.     

The local state and urban local government in Zambia

It is argued, with reference to urban local government in Zambia, particularly in Lusaka, that recent debates on the form and functions of the national state in Africa may be used to illuminate the working of the urban local state. Available evidence on the class interests represented in the urban local state is reviewed, and these interests and their actions with respect to personal accumulation and political clientelism are found to be similar to those found at the national level. The urban local state in Zambia performs functions similar to those which have been revealed by analyses of other countries, although the nature of these functions, and the extent to which they are successfully performed, is influenced by the political and economic context, the institutional framework and especially the constraints imposed by central government on local autonomy. The changes proposed in the 1980 Local Administration Act are outlined, and a preliminary assessment made of the extent to which they are likely to change the form and functions of the urban local state.     

Turning around local economies: Managerial strategies and community assets

Nontraditional “invisible” sources of growth are identified through a case study of a diversified industrial region in Massachusetts. Firm-specific managerial strategies are found to be an important element in the determination of economic growth. Customized and hybrid firms characterize major departures from the product-cycle model in which product specialization and service specialization attached to traditional products allow them to avoid productcycle maturity. The interaction of these business strategies with invisible community factors such as labor force quality and the labor-management environment significantly influences local economic growth. These findings indicate the importance of targeting development efforts at the firm as opposed to the industry level and the need to better utilize local invisible factors as a basis for boosting local economic growth.     

Assessing excellence poorly: The bottom line in local government

Methods and outcomes of local governments' assessments of service excellence were examined in a meta-analysis of 261 citizen surveys administered during the last ten years to more than 200,000 U.S. residents who were intended to represent over 30 million Americans. Evaluations of local government services were calculated for good and bad assessment procedures. While assessment methods were poor whether or not applied by outside consultants, good survey methods tended to provide the same account of service delivery as did bad survey methods. Despite the meager correlation of method with outcome, improvement of assessment methods was recommended as a necessary, albeit insufficient, step in raising the enthusiasm of public administrators for meaningful outcome measures.     

Public choice in a local government setting

From its beginnings, public choice has always had a substantial component devoted to federalism and local government decision-making. The DeVoe Moore Center at Florida State University has made the study of local government within a public choice framework a core component of its mission. The Center held a conference February 17?C19, 2011, on public choice in a local government setting. This special issue of Public Choice contains the papers presented at that conference.     

District planning and local government in Kenya

In many ways the autonomy of local government in Kenya has declined in the last twenty years. After reviewing the various tendencies towards centralization which can be observed and looking at some of the reforms which have occurred, the current district planning approach, known as the District Focus for Rural Development Strategy, is analysed in order to explore the roles played within it by local government. Policy documents and other official statements are discussed, as are the attitudes of political and administrative leaders. Whilst the new strategy is supposed to bring about greater decentralization, it has led to a continuing reduction of local government autonomy especially for the county councils. However, pessimistic conclusions can not be easily drawn. Local government is not likely to be abolished, the new approach may enable it to play a more effective planning role—even if a less autonomous one—and there are other forms of local participation (especially through community development) which partly compensate for the erosion of formal local government.     

The politics of redistribution in local government

Abstract. This paper deals with the politics of redistribution in local government. Traditionally, it has been assumed that redistributive policies are crucial in electoral competition and party politics, both in national and local political systems. From this perspective, differences in local competition and party systems are essential to an explanation of local redistributive efforts. Peterson (1981), however, claims that redistributive policies are excluded from the local agenda because they impair local economic prosperity. These policies are therefore not conceived as instruments in the vote-maximizing strategies of local political parties. In this paper, hypotheses on the impact of party competition and party politics on local redistribution are formulated and tested on data for 342 Dutch municipalities. The results show that, contrary to what would be expected from Peterson's perspective, municipal redistributive efforts were related to electoral competitiveness and the party system. The proposed model, however, proved to be unsatisfactory in accurately predicting the direction of the effects of these explanatory variables. These results suggest that, rather than abandoning the study of local redistribution as a non-issue in subnational politics, an effort should be made to develop a better theoretical understanding of the ways in which competition and party politics shape these policies.     

Expenditures and receipts in state and local government finances: Reply

It is worth repeating that causality testing is a very complex task. The diversity of views on interpreting the definition of causality and on the methods for testing causality highlight this issue. In our study, we cite an excellent article which provides a detailed critique of various problems associated with causality tests (see Conway, et al., 1984). It would appear that Chowdhury's comment draws very strong conclusions and fails to consider some of the complex theoretical issues regarding causality tests as well as important data problems pertaining to state and local governments. Moreover, we find it somewhat curious that, given the strong similarities in our two studies, Chowdhury prefers to dwell on the mechanics of an alternative technique rather than concentrate on the fact that his alternative technique yields supporting results to our 1987 paper on the tax-spend hypothesis.The views expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Department of Treasury.     

Expenditures and receipts in state and local government finances: Comment

The aim of this note has been to show that Marlow and Manage's (1987) paper suffers from serious methodological problems due to the non-stationary data series used and the arbitrary lag lengths employed. Use of appropriate stationarity tests and optimal lag lengths of the variables change some of the basic conclusions of their paper. Contrary to their suggestion, the presence of a feedback between local tax receipts and expenditures imply that local governments should be concerned with the implication of their spending and revenue-enhancing decisions on their budget. Decisions to increase current expenditures may lead to higher future taxes. Similarly, efforts to impose higher taxes to reduce budget deficits at the local government level may be futile due to a subsequent increase in spending.     

中国地方政府管理创新的悖论分析:动力与困境

改革开放以来,我国的地方政府管理发生了巨大的变革,但仍存在一些亟待解决的问题。为适应社会主义市场经济和全球化的要求,近年来,地方政府积极探索政府管理创新。在这一过程中,政治环境、文化环境、经济环境、国际环境的变化即社会生态环境的变化构成了其外部动力,地方政府及其官员谋求地区经济的发展和自身利益的实现构成了其直接的动力。同时,地方政府管理创新也面临着阻力和困境,是在动力与阻力的矛盾互动中进行和发展的。