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The past two decades have witnessed numerous attempts in developing countries at institutionalizing decentralization. Political leaders tended, before then, to believe that centralized planning was the key to economic growth and development. Ghana has not been excluded from this wave towards the transfer of power, competences, resources and functions from the centre to local levels of government. While Ghana has achieved significant political and administrative decentralization as well as decentralized planning, fiscal decentralization has been the unyielding component of the process. This paper examines the desirability, or otherwise, of fiscal decentralization in the context of funding arrangements. It uses the funding regime model as a basis for analysing how regulatory provisions, political and economic factors and practices, determine financial capacity of sub-national governments. Evidence in the paper leads to the conclusion that sub-national governments in Ghana do not support fiscal autonomy. They, instead, prefer being served and financed by the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper conducts an empirical investigation into the effects of financial liberalization policies on the growth of 19 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Two indexes are constructed which measure the gradual progression and institutional changes involved in financial liberalization. Because these indexes track specific financial liberalization policies, they provide better measures of financial liberalization than the indicators of financial development often used in the literature. Panel data estimates show a significant positive relationship between economic growth and financial liberalization policies. Our results are robust to alternative specifications of the model, and also across slow- and fast-growing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]