Abstract
After its many failures the centralized state has lost a great deal of legitimacy and many social scientists and policy makers now put more faith in decentralized development. In public economics there is a large literature on fiscal federalism, but it does not usually deal with some of the political-economy and institutional factors that arise in the specific context of developing countries. These latter factors give rise to some governance dilemmas involving different kinds of trade-offs and antinomies that lend some ambiguity and complexity to the outcome of decentralization, which is the focus of this lecture. The empirical (and theoretical) literature from several developing countries (including China and India) will be drawn upon.
About the speaker
Prof Pranab Bardhan received his PhD from Cambridge University. He is Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley. Before joining UC Berkeley, he had been at the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Indian Statistical Institute and Delhi School of Economics. He has also been Visiting Professor / Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, St Catherine's College, Oxford, and London School of Economics. He held the Distinguished Fulbright Siena Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-09. He was the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010 and 2011.
Prof Bardhan has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on international trade. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. His current research involves theoretical and empirical work on decentralized governance, and the political economy of development in China and India.
Prof Bardhan was Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003. He was the co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance for 1996-2007. He is the author of 12 books and of more than 120 journal articles and editor of 12 other books.
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