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Partial contents: Political parties and decentralization; Effective management as a precondition of effective decentralization; Administrative decentralization and neighborhood government: the New York City experience; The great revenue sharing debate.

AbstractThe process of decentralization plays a vital role to enhance the welfare of society through the provision of public goods and services. This study investigates the impact of different dimensions of decentralization on rural–urban poverty and total poverty for Pakistan. For empirical analysis, this study uses time‐series data covering the period from 1980 to 2018. The auto‐regressive distributive lag model bounds testing cointegration method is used for long‐run estimation and error correction dynamic for short‐run movements of variables. The results show that fiscal and administrative decentralization are more beneficial for overall and rural–urban poverty reduction. The surprising results of political decentralization increases poverty overall in the case of Pakistan. For poverty reduction, the government should try to reduce the political concentration of elite groups in Pakistan. Moreover, to curtail poverty, government policy should be focused on effective strategies to address inflation and development of GDP per capita growth.

Confronting Suburbanization; Copyright; Contents; Notes on Contributors; List of Illustrations; Glossary; Series Editors' Preface; Preface; Chapter 1 The Challenge of Postsocialist Suburbanization; Introduction; Urbanization, Suburbanization, and Socioeconomic Order; Urban growth under socialism; The postsocialist suburban revolution; Placing Postsocialist Suburbanization in the Context of Global Urbanization and Sustainable Development; Postsocialist suburbanization and global urbanism; The postsocialist sprawl and sustainability; Book structure and organization.

In the latter half of the past decade, school districts in several large cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and post-Katrina New Orleans, have implemented an urban school decentralization model generally known as "portfolio districts." Others, including those in Denver and Cleveland, are following suit in what appears to be a growing trend. The portfolio strategy has become increasingly prominent in educational policy circles, think tank and philanthropy literature, and education news reporting. As CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan embraced the portfolio district model. His appointment as U.S. Secretary of Education suggests the Obama administration also supports the approach. The premise of the portfolio strategy is that if superintendents build portfolios of schools that encompass a variety of educational approaches offered by different vendors, then over time school districts will weed out under-performing approaches and vendors; as a result, more children will have more opportunities for academic success. This brief examines the available evidence for the viability of this premise and the proposals that flow from it.

The worldwide trend to decentralize the responsibilities and budgets of governments impacts local firm dynamics in various ways. We use the example of Spain to test empirically whether the decentralization of governance has been conducive to increased diversification and a more even city-size distribution in the Spanish urban system during a period of continuous reductions in transport costs. To this end we develop a bivariate probit regression framework to assess the probability that cities diversify or specialize over time, using a sample of 69 urban areas in Spain during the period 1995-2007. We exploit unique firm-level and time-varying transport-cost data to control for the role of a city's market potential, city size, transport costs, labor-force skill composition, product standardization and historical patterns of specialization. We find a high probability that a city will diversify if it is the capital of a regional government or located in a relatively decentralized region, while the opposite is true for the probability that a city will specialize. Also, we find that a city's status as a regional capital reinforces the positive effect of a high (low) internal market potential on the probability of diversification (specialization). A high (low) external market potential only increases the probability that a city will become specialized (diversified) if it is a regional capital. We argue that the link between decentralization and specialization patterns in the urban system deserves more attention in the empirical literature on decentralization's impact on economic growth, income inequality and regional disparities.

Urban scholars have long noted the importance of the convention business in the economic development of the downtown areas in U.S. cities. This article examines the decentralization of the convention business to Atlanta's suburbs since 1980. The process of decentralization has resulted in a competition for meetings that pits one suburban convention submarket against another and against downtown in a multicentered metropolitan region. The spread of Atlanta's convention business to the suburbs has implications for both scholars and practitioners.