IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cdiwps/halshs-00553122.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Decentralization in Africa and the nature of local governments' competition: evidence from Benin

Author

Listed:
  • Emilie Caldeira

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Grégoire Rota-Graziosi

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Martial Foucault

    (Political Science Department - Political Science Department - UdeM - Université de Montréal)

Abstract

Without denying particular dimensions of the decentralisation in Sub-Saharan countries, this paper applies standard reasoning from the fiscal federalism literature to a developing country and tests the existence of strategic interactions among local Beninese governments, called 'communes'. We first propose a two-jurisdiction model of public expenditure interactions, considering a constrained Nash equilibrium to capture the extreme poverty of some communes. We show that spillovers among jurisdictions involve strategic behaviours of local officials who have sufficient levels of fiscal resources. Second, by estimating a spatial lag model, our analysis provides evidence for the presence of strategic interactions in Benin, contingent on 'communes fiscal autonomy. Such interactions arise among communes which are geographically or ethnically close. We also highlight both an opportunistic behaviour of local governments before local elections and an effect of partisan affiliations. This African democracy appears to be as concerned as developed democracies with strategic fiscal interactions.

Suggested Citation

  • Emilie Caldeira & Grégoire Rota-Graziosi & Martial Foucault, 2011. "Decentralization in Africa and the nature of local governments' competition: evidence from Benin," CERDI Working papers halshs-00553122, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:cdiwps:halshs-00553122
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00553122
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00553122/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:cdiwps:halshs-00553122. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Contact - CERDI - Université Clermont Auvergne (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.