Person:
Shah, Anwar

Global Practice for Governance, The World Bank
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Fields of Specialization
governance; public sector reform; budgetary accountability;
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Global Practice for Governance, The World Bank
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Last updated: January 31, 2023

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Publication
    How Close Is Your Government to Its People? Worldwide Indicators on Localization and Decentralization
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-07) Ivanyna, Maksym; Shah, Anwar
    This paper is intended to provide an assessment of the impact of the silent revolution of the last three decades on moving governments closer to people to establish fair, accountable, incorruptible and responsive governance. To accomplish this, a unique data set is constructed for 182 countries by compiling data from a wide variety of sources to examine success toward decentralized decision making across the globe. An important feature of this data set is that, for comparative purposes, it measures government decision making at the local level rather than at the sub-national levels used in the existing literature. The data are used to rank countries on political, fiscal and administrative dimensions of decentralization and localization. These sub-indexes are aggregated and adjusted for heterogeneity to develop an overall ranking of countries on the closeness of their government to the people. The resulting rankings provide a useful explanation of the Arab Spring and other recent political movements and waves of dissatisfaction with governance around the world.
  • Publication
    Decentralization and Corruption : New Cross-country Evidence
    (2011) Ivanyna, Maksym; Shah, Anwar
    We attempt to improve the understanding and measurement of decentralization and its relationship with corruption in a worldwide context. This is done by presenting the conceptual underpinnings of such a relationship as well as using more defensible measures of both decentralization in its various dimensions as well as corruption for a sample of 158 countries. It is the first paper that treats various tiers of local governments (below the intermediate order of government) as the unit of comparative analysis. By pursuing rigorous econometric analysis we demonstrate that decentralization, when properly measured to mean moving government closer to people by empowering local governments, is shown to have a significant negative effect on the incidence of corruption regardless of the choice of the estimation procedures or the measures of corruption used. In terms of various dimensions of decentralized local governance, political decentralization matters even when we control for fiscal decentralization. Further voice (political accountability) is empirically shown to be more important in combating corruption than exit options made available though competition among jurisdictions.
  • Publication
    Decentralization (Localization) and Corruption : New Cross-Country Evidence
    (2010-05-01) Ivanyna, Maksym; Shah, Anwar
    This paper attempts to improve the understanding and measurement of decentralization and its relationship with corruption in a worldwide context. This is done by presenting the conceptual underpinnings of such relationship as well as using superior and more defensible measures of both decentralization in its various dimensions as well as corruption for a sample of 182 countries. It is the first paper that treats various tiers of local governments (below the inter-mediate order of government) as the unit of comparative analysis. In contrast, previous analyses erroneously focused on subnational governments as the unit of analysis which yields invalid cross-country comparisons. By pursuing rigorous econometric analysis, the paper demonstrates that decentralization, when properly measured to mean moving government closer to people by empowering local governments, is shown to have significant negative effect on the incidence of corruption regardless of the choice of the estimation procedures or the measures of corruption used. In terms of various dimensions of decentralized local governance, political decentralization matters even when we control for fiscal decentralization. Further voice (political accountability) is empirically shown to be more important in combating corruption than exit options made available through competition among jurisdictions.
  • Publication
    Citizen-centric Governance Indicators : Measuring and Monitoring Governance by Listening to the People and Not the Interest Groups
    (2010-01-01) Ivanyna, Maksym; Shah, Anwar
    Governance indicators are now widely used as tools for conducting development dialogue, allocating external assistance, and influencing foreign direct investment. This paper argues that available governance indicators are not suitable for these purposes as they do not conceptualize governance and fail to capture how citizens perceive the governance environment and outcomes in their countries. The paper attempts to fill this void by conceptualizing governance and implementing a uniform and consistent framework for measuring governance quality across countries and over time based on citizens' evaluations. Using data from the World Values Survey (and other sources) we implement this framework into practice and build citizen-centric governance indicators for 120 countries over the period 1994 to 2005.