The government of Laos has carried out regressive organizational changes in its electric power sector including deregulation, decentralization, and devolution. As governmental agencies attempt to improve their organization, little is understood about the impact these changes have on the electric sector. Using Burke's organization change theory as the foundation, the purpose of this qualitative study was to explain the impact of organizational change on rural electrification in the Champassak Province, Laos. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 20 participants representing governmental agencies, private entities, and nongovernmental organizations. Data were also collected through observation of a public consultative meeting and reviewing of publicly available documents, both of which were related to electrification. Data were inductively coded and analyzed using a thematic procedure. According to the study findings, organizational change helped expand electrification at the early stage. However, shortcomings such as setting onerous tax rates and promulgating convoluted laws by the public sector have caused static growth in both the trend of project finance and electrification recently. The positive social change implications stemming from this study include recommendations to local policy makers and legislators to tailor the fiscal policy and statutes, which may support wider electrification efforts in the Champassak Province.

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This thesis deals with the question of people's participation in rural development in Sri Lanka with specific reference to the district of Anuradhapura. When we consider people's participation in rural development it is essential to understand the meanings attached to the concepts of development, rural development, participation and decentralization. Therefore, Chapter 2 of this thesis concentrates on these concepts. The nature and degree of people's participation depends in great part on the socio-economic and cultural aspects of the people who live in the region or the area. Therefore, Chapter 3 deals with the significance of the rural sector in Sri Lanka and investigates income levels, nutritional status and employment, the village society, and the socio-cultural patterns of Sri Lanka. This chapter especially considers the socio-economic and cultural situation which effects people's participation in Sri Lanka. The importance of rural development is discussed in Chapter 4. This chapter explains the scope of rural development in Sri Lanka. In this case the chapter concentrates on the history of rural development, decentralization, and integrated rural development programmes. Also it describes the organizations which already exist in the rural sector in Sri Lanka. Chapter 5 discusses Anuradhapura district as a case study and it mainly deals with the situation and basic features, such as agriculture, economy, population, education and labour force. Also, it describes the administrative structure of the district with special attention to political structure, Kachcheri and divisions, other departments and the Buddhists temple. Institutional capacity and effective participation in Anuradhapura district is discussed in Chapter 6 in order to analyse the effectiveness of organizations in the district. To achieve this objective Chapter 6 discusses the integrated rural development project in Anuradhapura district and the reasons for people's non-participation in it. The thesis concludes that people's participation is an essential ingredient of successful rural development in Sri Lanka but there are a number of constraints. Some recommendations to promote the people's participation are given in the conclusion.

<p>There is a realisation that urbanisation has overstretched the ability and efforts of central governments to serve from the centre, thus, giving rise to the search for a robust decentralisation policy that vests urban local governments with some level of autonomy.1 It is in this context that decentralisation has become critical in order to sufficiently respond to the varied service delivery challenges brought about by increasing urbanisation. However, all efforts to capacitate urban councils through the process of decentralisation are futile if the urban local governments lack the necessary financial means to fulfil their responsibilities.</p>

Decentralization is a key governance reform which many developing countries have embarked on. Local governments are expected to use their informational advantage to improve the delivery of public goods. This result implied by Tiebout’s (1956) model requires fully informed citizens who “vote with their feet.” The model’s application to developing countries has been limited, since local decisions may not be responsive to local demands. Practitioners are shifting to innovations that minimize institutional constraints so that decentralized programs can lead to improved outcomes. Examples of such innovative ways include decentralized agricultural extension programs, which embrace farmers’ empowerment, local government, and private sector participation. Few impact evaluation studies on agricultural extension have combined qualitative and quantitative methods. This dissertation contributes to the literature by applying these methods and survey data to study the impact of a decentralized extension program in Uganda, known as the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) on the value of farm production per acre. The program is non-randomly assigned to local governments and farmers self-select in or out within participating sub-counties. Using a sample of 305 participating and non-participating farmers and local government assessment indicators as instruments, we cannot reject the null that the NAADS program has had an impact. The 2SLS results show no program impact; however, the OLS results show that the program had a positive impact on the value of farm production per acre of about 20 percent. Qualitative results show that NAADS farmers: participate in local decision making processes through farmers’ institutions; have increased knowledge on farming; and practice enterprise diversification. The quantitative finding must be treated with caution; for example, the study did not account for spillover effects. The NAADS program faces challenges inherent in Uganda’s decentralized structure; particularly the low financial and human capacity, and the weak monitoring at the local level. The policy implications include: the need to strengthen farmers’ institutions; development of a marketing strategy; clear policy guidelines for local government support to NAADS; improved coordination of NAADS activities among line ministries; need for additional resources for NAADS activities; and improved capacity of service providers.

This dissertation seeks to investigate the relationship between public sector employment and fiscal decentralization. We develop a theoretical model that helps us understand the interaction of the central executive's and subnational governor's decisions on the level of public employees at the central and subnational levels. Our empirical work shows that fiscal decentralization policy shifts central government employees to the subnational government level and that the increase in public employees at the subnational government level overwhelms the decrease in public employees at the central level. As a result, the level of total public sector employees increases with the degree of fiscal decentralization of a country. We also find that the levels of total public sector employees as a percentage of population are higher in unitary country systems than those in federal countries. The level of public employment also increases with the degree of urbanization and with the exposure to risk of a country. This is a somewhat surprising result. Typically, more public employment is associated with an excessive number of public sector employees, and, therefore, with unproductive spending. On the other hand, fiscal decentralization policy has been generally thought to result in an increase in allocative efficiency, since a decision on public expenditures made by a level of government that is closer and more responsive to a local constituency is more likely to reflect the demand for local services than a decision made by a remote central government. In addition, decentralization has been thought of as having the potential of improving competition among governments and of facilitating technical innovations. Therefore, one might expect that fiscal decentralization should help to retrench the public sector employment. However, from our empirical result, we find that subnational governors without taking full responsibility for subnational public finance tend to bloat the levels of subnational government employees and ask the central government to pay the bill. As a result, the level of total public sector employees increases with fiscal decentralization policy. These findings are much in line with Oates' and Wallis' anticipated results, but they are based on different explanations. Employing the two most commonly used spatial dependency tests, Moran's I and Getis and Ord's G statistics, we also find evidence of spatial dependency in terms of the level of public sector employees as a percentage of population among the countries in our dataset. This finding suggests that while using a country's own domestic variables to explain the level of public sector employment, we should not ignore that the neighboring countries' policies also play an important role in determining it.

This dissertation provides an empirical test of the effects of fiscal decentralization and horizontal fiscal equalization on economic growth and examines the potential trade-off between horizontal fiscal equalization and economic growth in both China and India. Chapter II examines the effects of both fiscal decentralization and horizontal fiscal equalization on economic growth in China, particularly the effect of the Tax Sharing System reform enacted in 1994. Compared with previous studies, using more complete data providing better measures and more econometrically sophisticated instrumental variable procedures, we find that there is no substantial evidence of a trade-off between horizontal fiscal equalization and growth. The 1994 Tax Sharing System reform has positively contributed to both economic growth and horizontal fiscal equalization. In addition, we find that fiscal decentralization (FD) has a non-linear effect on growth. For values of FD less than 21, fiscal decentralization has a negative effect on growth, but for values greater than 21, fiscal decentralization has a positive effect on growth. Chapter III examines the effects of both fiscal decentralization and horizontal fiscal equalization on economic growth in India, particularly the effects of the 1991 economic reforms. Using state-wide data covering the period from 1980 through 2005, we find that fiscal decentralization has a negative effect on economic growth initially but that, beyond a certain value of fiscal decentralization, the effect on growth becomes positive. However, further decentralization could have a negative effect on horizontal fiscal equalization. These results are robust. In the meanwhile, there is no evidence of a trade-off between horizontal fiscal equalization and economic growth; instead, there is evidence of a positive effect of economic growth on equalization. In addition, the 1991 economic reform has contributed to economic growth. A comparative study of China and India has shown that the degree of fiscal decentralization in both countries is far from the point where its effect on economic growth becomes positive. Despite the dangers of widening disparities in terms of interregional fiscal resource distribution from further decentralization, no substantial evidence shows a trade-off between horizontal fiscal equalization and growth in either country. An in-depth and more thorough going fiscal decentralization with greater emphasis on equalization of fiscal disparities are required in order to effect sustainable economic growth as well as social harmony in these two Asian countries.

With this study we aim to create an understanding about motivational effect of using centralized goal-setting in multiunit organizations. Multiunit organizations are often decentralized in their structure, allowing units and their employees to have control over their day-to-day activities and decisions. At the same time, the organization requires control in order to create uniformity. A way to impose control is by using performance targets for the units and its employees. The employees are used to being self-directed in their work, and we have researched how this central form of control will affect their motivation.   In order to illustrate this, we have conducted a qualitative case study at different units in a banking and insurance company in Sweden. Goal-setting has increased in this industry, and at the same time, employees have the mandate to make decisions about their daily work at a local level. We therefore argue that using a multiunit company in this industry will illustrate the motivational effect of centrally assigned goals. We have conducted ten semi-structured interviews with sales employees and with two managers of Organization X. Our research approach to this study is of an abductive character, as our process has been back and forth between existing theory and findings from our research.             The mainly intrinsically motivated employees in this case expressed an understanding of the assigned goals. However, they had difficulties being committed to the goals because they felt that the goals were set too far away from their local market. Sales employees in this type of organizational structure are used to have the mandate to control their day-to-day work activities, and therefore it becomes frustrating for them to partly be controlled in terms of sales targets. Centralized assigned goals have a negative effect on motivation for most of the employees, who have trouble accepting and feeling committed to the goals. However, the assigned goals can temporarily trigger motivation to sell certain products, for example through a competition. We argue that the distribution of the centrally assigned goals have to be well communicated and explained to the employees, and that organizations give room for local adjustment of the centrally assigned goals.

Slow agrarian development has often been blamed on the absence of civil society mobilization. This paper quantitatively analyzes the effect of political and fiscal decentralization on agricultural development in 30 democratizing African States. Hence two hypotheses are tested: H1) New democracies that combine elected sub-national governments with fiscal decentralization will be more likely to spend more in agriculture. H2) In such system we should observe better agricultural outputs, other things equal. Results reveal that counter-intuitively simultaneous democratic and fiscal decentralization have a negative impact on public investment in agriculture. On the other hand, as expected fiscal decentralization does not have any significant impact in the absence of democratic decentralization. Most importantly democratic decentralization is found to have a highly positive impact on the provision of agricultural related public goods when fiscal decentralization is low. The test also reveals that fiscal and political decentralization positively influence agricultural production.

We analyze issues arising from demand management in decentralized decision-making environments. We consider logistics systems and supply chains, where companies' operations are handled with independent entities whose decisions affect the performance of the overall system. In the first study, we focus on a logistics system in the sea cargo industry, where demand is booked by independent sales agents, and the agents' capacity limits and sales incentives are determined by a central headquarters. We develop models for the central headquarters to analyze and optimize capacity allocation and sales incentives to improve the performance of the decentralized system. We use network flow problems to incorporate agent behavior in our models, and we link these individual problems through an overall optimization problem that determines the capacity limits. We prove a worst-case bound on the decentralized system performance and show that the choice of sales incentive impacts the performance. In the second study, we focus on supply chains in the automotive industry, where decentralization occurs as a result of the non-direct sales channels of the auto manufacturers. Auto manufacturers can affect their demand through sales promotions. We use a game theoretical model to examine the impact of retailer incentive and customer rebate promotions on the manufacturer's pricing and the retailer's ordering/sales decisions. We consider several models with different demand characteristics and information asymmetry between the manufacturer and a price discriminating retailer. We characterize the subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium decisions and determine which promotion would benefit the manufacturer under which market conditions. We find that the retailer incentives are preferred when demand is known. On the other hand, when demand is highly uncertain the manufacturer is better off with customer rebates. We extend this research by analyzing a competitive setting with two manufacturers and two retailers, where the manufacturers' promotions vary between retailer incentives and customer rebates. We find an equilibrium outcome where customer rebates reduce the competitor's profits to zero. We observe in numerical examples that the manufacturers are able to increase their sales and profits with retailer incentives, although this can be at the expense of the retailers' profits under some situations.