Decentralization,local governance and centre–periphery conflict in Sierra Leone

Issues of centralization–decentralization and centre–periphery resource distribution are frequent administrative and political concerns which can have, upon occasion, very profound consequences for the stability of a society. An analysis of recent events in Sierra Leone demonstrates their significance. On 25 May, 1997 the country's first democratically elected government in almost 30 years was overthrown after little more than a year in office by a group of rebellious military officers. Most commentators have attributed this turn of events simply to military disgruntlement. In fact, a careful analysis demonstrates that the central government's commitment to decentralization and the strengthening of local governance exacerbated the centre–periphery conflict issues that have plagued the country since its independence and thus were the real underlying causal factors. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Institutional law and economics

Behavioral economics provides one of the foundation for institutional law and economics (ILE). Improvement in predicting the performance of alternative laws will be built on ILE insights into how distribution affects productivity of labor and realization of joint gains. Our understanding of obedience to law as well as other categories of failure to be opportunistic (such as in high exclusion-cost situations) will be better understood from an ILE perspective that investigates learning to supplement specific sanctions.The boundaries of ILE inquiry encompass private property rights, regulation, and public spending and taxation since these are complements and substitutes. Public spending is not a good measure of the size of government, and regulation is not the opposite of freedom in the aggregate. This framework of ILE can usefully be seen as distinctive, even if all of its practitioners do not use the label and several of its propositions are shared with other paradigms. A better label might simply be institutional economics or political economy.