Description
| Summary: | This paper takes stock of Madagascar's first 10 years of decentralization. As it happened in many other developing countries, particularly in Africa, Madagascar's decentralization process has seen reversals, uncertainties and lack of clarity all along. This explains why Madagascar, despite the experience with decentralization, remains a highly centralized country with only about 3-4 percent of expenditures spent below the center and with very few prerogatives decentralized to the local level. Notwithstanding the structural impediments to decentralization in poor countries, many positive lessons can be drawn from the Madagascar case, which point to the potentials of the decentralization process. This study provides a detailed analysis of local government finances and develops a methodology for measuring local financing needs (local fiscal gap methodology). Based on this analysis, the study argues that a lot can be gained from simplifying administrative arrangements and fiscal relationships. Instead of a full-blown and ambitious decentralization strategy, this book suggests a number of reforms, which would go a long way by making the current structure work better. These reforms include: (1) a full transfer of the (limited) local competencies to commune, particularly local revenue collection; (2) increasing transfers to rural communes so that per capita allocations would be the same across communes-rural and urban; and (3) assigning revenues to one level of government only, except for some very specific types of taxes (such as on natural resources).
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| Item Description: | "The report has been prepared by a team consisting of Wolfgang Fengler (task team leader) [and others]"--Page ix. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 97 pages) : illustrations |
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| Format: | Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. |
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| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 95-97). |
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| ISBN: | 0821358413
9780821358412
0821358421
9780821358429 |
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| Reproduction Note: | Electronic reproduction. |
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| Action Note: | digitized |
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