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Contributions from
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Books and Media
Going regional – at the expense of the centre
An empire incorporating its own demise
War economies
Debt problem and insolvency procedure
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Consequences of decentralisation
Going regional – at the expense of the centre
Jean-Jacques Dethier (ed.): Governance, Decentralization and Reform in China, India and Russia. Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000, 459 pp., € 195.50 ISBN 0-7923-7909-8
The book documents a conference at the Centre for Development Research in May 1999, presenting a series of papers looking at the relationship between governance, decentralisation and development in China, India and Russia. Three questions are addressed. How do different forms of fiscal adjustment between central, regional and local authorities affect local resource mobilisation and local spending? What effect does decentralisation have on the quantity and quality of public service provision and on social and economic development? And what constitutional reforms are needed for a functioning market economy?
Although no rules can be derived from the country studies presented, the papers provide some interesting pointers for architects of governance reform. Local resource mobilisation is more vigorously promoted, for example, if the tax revenues transferred by local to central government are set for several years, as in China, and not renegotiated annually as in Russia. Both Russia and China, however, have found that reforming the rules of fiscal adjustment in favour of the regions has led to an unintended downturn in national tax revenues. Russia's experience shows that regional tax collection is considerably more effective in the wake of reform than the collection of national taxes. And even in China, it seems, not enough incentives have been found to ensure effective national tax collection by the erstwhile local tax officials in the central tax administration.
The conference volume is worth reading because the authors do not shrink from controversy but make their case on the basis of empirical data. They also raise a number of key questions for further research – questions about the political, economic and social requirements that need to be met for successful decentralisation, for example, or about the cultural and institutional framework required to enable laws to shape human behaviour. To find convincing answers to questions like that, however, the concept of the New Political Economy embraced by the authors of this book needs to be supplemented by concepts from empirical?analytical political and administrative science (interests, power, conflicts, participation, accountability, democracy, etc.).
Markus Steinich
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