How Close Is Your Government to Its People? Worldwide Indicators on Localization and Decentralization
This paper is intended to provide an assessment of the impact of the silent revolution of the last three decades on moving governments closer to people to establish fair, accountable, incorruptible and responsive governance. To accomplish this, a u...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/07/16516399/close-your-government-people-worldwide-indicators-localization-decentralization http://hdl.handle.net/10986/11969 |
| Summary: | This paper is intended to provide an
assessment of the impact of the silent revolution of the
last three decades on moving governments closer to people to
establish fair, accountable, incorruptible and responsive
governance. To accomplish this, a unique data set is
constructed for 182 countries by compiling data from a wide
variety of sources to examine success toward decentralized
decision making across the globe. An important feature of
this data set is that, for comparative purposes, it measures
government decision making at the local level rather than at
the sub-national levels used in the existing literature.
The data are used to rank countries on political, fiscal and
administrative dimensions of decentralization and
localization. These sub-indexes are aggregated and adjusted
for heterogeneity to develop an overall ranking of countries
on the closeness of their government to the people. The
resulting rankings provide a useful explanation of the Arab
Spring and other recent political movements and waves of
dissatisfaction with governance around the world. |
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