Is There a Global Link between Regional Disparities and Devolution?

By A. Rodríguez‐Pose, N. Gill. 2004

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we present an examination of the possible correlation between rising income inequalities at the regional level and widespread devolutionary initiatives worldwide. When the responsibility and resource-based facets of decentralisation are taken together a marked congruency is evident between the two trends. Various spatial economic forces promote the emergence of core and peripheral regions, and devolution, by establishing the autonomy of these regions, allows these forces a greater impact. We argue that this is because decentralisation initiatives carry with them implicit fiscal, political, and administrative costs, which fall more heavily upon those regions with limited adjustment capacities, resulting in differential rates at which regions can capitalise upon the opportunities offered by devolution. The global tendency towards devolution therefore reflects a subtle, but profound, renunciation of the traditional equalisation role of national government in favour of conditions fostering economic and public competition and leading to greater development of initially rich and powerful regions to the detriment of poorer areas.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f24c4f0b1b8eda48fcae325aabe49685d71b08c9

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Citations in the corpus

The urban transition in Sub-Saharan Africa: implications for economic growth and poverty reduction (2006, background): “…the results of many export processing zones (EPZs) in a wide range of developing countries in the past, including in Africa, should impose a 57 Rodriguez-Pose and Gill (2003) show for a global sample of countries that fiscal devolution that simply increases the fiscal autonomy of subnational…”
Cohesion Policy in the European Union: Growth, Geography, Institutions (2011, unknown): “Regional inequalities in the EU are higher than those found in the US, but also significantly lower than those found in most countries in the developing world (Rodríguez-Pose and Gill, 2004).”
Fiscal Decentralization and Regional Disparity: Evidence from Cross-Section and Panel Data (2009, unknown): “In order to confirm the result of the graphical analysis, and following the approaches of Shankar and Shah (2003) and Gil Canaleta et al.”
Political Decentralization, Electoral Change and Party Organizational Adaptation (2003, background): “…party elites carry out decentralising reforms, they do so because they expect to benefit from them, either by offloading responsibility for difficult policy problems, or because such reforms will have redistributive consequences favourable to their support base (Rodríguez-Pose and Gill 2002).”
On the ‘economic dividend’ of devolution (2005, background): “…of devolution requires knowledge of the institutional geography in which economic forces seek to there is growing evidence to suggest that devolution, at least in the case of large countries, may have regressive differences in lifestyle and modes of interaction. effects (Ŕ-P and G, 2004a).”
Shifting horizons in local and regional development (2017, background): “Moreover, under certain conditions, the trend to devolution has contributed to the growth of local and regional inequalities by empowering already strong regions (Rodríguez-Pose & Gill, 2004).”
The Rise of the “City-region” Concept and its Development Policy Implications (2008, background): “Smaller city-regions rely on weaker tax bases, have less access to financial markets, and command less influence over central government discretionary spending (Rodriguez-Pose & Gill, 2004b , 2005 ).”
Regional Inequality and Decentralization: An Empirical Analysis (2012, unknown): “For my empirical investigation, I follow Rodríguez-Pose and Gill (2004), Ezcurra and Pascual (2008), Lessmann (2009), and Rodríguez-Pose and Ezcurra (2010) in using the regional GDP per capita (pc) as a starting point for the calculation of disparity measures.”
Does decentralization matter for regional disparities? A cross-country analysis (2010, background): “In addition, as decentralization undermines the power of the central state to play an equalising role, it may lead to a transfer of economic development from the peripheries to the cores (Prud’homme, 1995; Rodríguez-Pose and Gill, 2004).”