دانلود رایگان مقاله تمرکززدایی و مشاغل حرفه ای سیاسی

ABSTRACT

Politicians’ career paths often start at some subnational governments and end at the national one. Allocation of authorities among national and subnational governments affects (i) how tempting the prospects of taking national offices are, and hence how strong bureaucrats’ political career concerns are, and (ii) whether the incentives generated by these political career concerns can be put into productive use at subnational governments. We illustrate this tradeoff in determining the optimal degree of decentralization using China as a case study. We also compare the equilibrium degree of decentralization in autocracy and in democracy.

5. Concluding

remarks Using an overlapping principal-agent model, we have explored how political career concerns generate a new tradeoff in determining the optimal degree of decentralization. While too much decentralization weakens bureaucrats’ political career concerns, and hence weakens their incentives to work, toolittle decentralizationleaves too few authorities for these incentives to be turned into productive use. Today’s degree of decentralization imposes externality on both tomorrow’s and yesterday’s governments. It affects tomorrow’s government because it affects how hard today’s bureaucrats work, and hence how well competent ones are identified and promoted as tomorrow’s leaders. It affects yesterday’s government because it affects yesterday’s bureaucrats’ political career concerns, and hence how hard they work. The channels through which political career concerns affect the optimal degree of decentralization are hence novel and do not have natural counterparts in the previous literature on federalism.

We close this paper with a few remarks on certain modeling choices we made in our analysis. First, we have made quite specific assumptions on a bureaucrat’s costs of production, manipulation, and embezzlement. In particular, production incurs a direct utility cost of 1 2 p2 i , while manipulation and embezzlement incur only indirect costs through the constraint pi + mi + ei ≤ 1. In fact, many alternative cost functions can similarly deliver a hump-shaped pi function (as a function of x, holding fixed x ) like the one depicted in Fig. 1, and hence either too much or too little decentralization would result in the bureaucrat spending little time in production. For example, an alternative assumption is that all three actions of the bureaucrat jointly result in a direct utility cost of 1 2 (pi + mi + ei)2, and there is no more indirect cost through constraints like pi + mi + ei ≤ 1. This alternative assumption would result in a graph of pi that looks like a trapezoid (instead of a triangle as in Fig. 1) in the range x ∈ [x1, x2].21 We slightly prefer our assumptions to this alternative assumption, because our assumptions generate a range of x where production and embezzlement co-exist, and hence allow us to tell a slightly more realistic story in our case study of China (where we suggest that post-1978 China may correspond to some x in the range (xˆ, x2) where production and embezzlement co-exist).