Constitutions, regulations, and taxes: Contradictions of different aspects of decentralization

摘要

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, post-constitutional regulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization - using a single dataset from the Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country and a variety of indicators. It finds no robust correlation between different decentralization aspects; moreover, three processes of devolution appearing in the same country at the same time seem to be driven by different (though partly overlapping) forces. Hence, a specific aspect of decentralization is hardly able to serve as a proxy for another one or for the overall decentralization process. Journal of Comparative Economics 38 (4) (2010) 395-418. Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Sonnemannstrasse 9-11, 60314 Frankfurt/Main, Germany; Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation.