Intergovernmental Transfers in Local Government Finance

Decentralization is a global movement. Writing in 1994 William Dillinger in his paper “Decentralization and its Implications for Urban Service Delivery” noted that of the 75 countries with populations in excess of 5 million all but 12 had embarked on some form of a transfer of authority and responsibility from the central to the lower tiers of government. There is no fresh count of countries that have taken the decentralization route but the explosion of literature and studies and the number of countries that have enacted local government statutes and codes would seem to suggest that decentralization has enveloped much of the world – the proviso being that the pace and depth at which decentralization has occurred as well as its scope vary sharply across countries.