Decentralization and Development in Developing Countries

本项目的目的是探讨权力下放改革对发展中国家政治和经济发展的影响。该项目的目标国家是泰国、菲律宾、马来西亚、印度尼西亚和中国。研究结果分为三个方面：分析发展中国家的地方政府，最近在上述国家的权力下放改革，和一些理论论点之间的关系，权力下放和发展。除了上述国家之外，我们还做了一些努力来了解韩国地方政府，这是亚洲最近最重要、最成功的权力下放案例。我们邀请了首尔城市大学的Young-Joo Kwon教授来了解韩国的情况。具体来说，我们在这个项目中所做的工作如下。首先，我们研究了上述国家有关地方政府的法律。赋予地方政府、中央政府外地机构、地方公务员等的权力，是我们收集信息的项目。其次，分析比较了两种地方政府体制的优缺点，即欧洲一体化模式和最近表现出来的分离主义模式--财政联邦主义模式。为了交流各国的信息，加深对该领域理论论点的理解，我们举办了六次研讨会，并将研究成果应用于实践。基于这两年的Kagaku-Kenkyu-Hi研究，该团队的M.Muramatsu、Y.Katayama、H.永井和K.Akizuki一直在参与JICA关于泰国权力下放和能力建设的泰日联合研究项目。

The purpose of this project is to explore the impact of decentralization reform on the political and economic development in developing countries. The targeted countries in this project have been Thailand, Philippine, Malaysia, Indonesia and China. The research results are grouped into three areas : analysis of local government in the developing countries, recent decentralization reforms in the above countries, and some theoretical arguments concerning the relationship between decentralization and developments. In addition to the above countries, we made some efforts to under-stand the Korean local government, which is the recent and most important and successful case of decentralization in Asia. We invited Professor Young-Joo Kwon from the City University of Seoul for information about the case of Korea.Concretely, what we have done in this project are as follow. First we studied laws concerning local government in the above countries. Powers given to local governments, field agencies of central government, local civil service etc., are the items about which we collected information. Secondly, we analyzed and compared the merits and demerits of the two types of the local governmental system, that is, the European integrationist model and, the separatist model expressed recently in the model of fiscal federalism. For the exchange of information on each country selected, and also for deepening the understanding of theoretical arguments in this field, we held workshops six times.Our research results are being applied in practice. Based on the this two years Kagaku-Kenkyu-Hi research, M.Muramatsu.Y.Katayama, H.Nagai and K.Akizuki from this team have been participating in the JICA project on Thai-Japan joint research on Thai Decentralization and Capacity Building.