Iván Finot

The Processes of Decentralization in Latin America

The processes of the region until now are oriented fundamentally to ensure the accomplishment of national social policies. How to make to orient them also to harness the local autonomy –and mainly to do it in conditions of equality– in order to make the local and regional development possible, and in addition to advance in other objectives? To respond to this question the author elaborates a synthesis of the economic theory on decentralization and, to the light of this frame, he widely reviews the processes of the region, using for it the unequal existing information. Their main recommendations to orient the processes are: (i) to differentiate between systems from financing from «corporate properties» and other potentials goods to decentralize: «territorial goods», where the fairness principle would be «equal level of provision to equal fiscal effort»; (ii) to induce an political-administrative territorial reordering oriented to reduce great demographic inequalities and of capacity between circumscriptions of a same level, and (iii) to take advantage of better endogenous capacities self-government.

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