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Development Priorities in an Emerging Decentralized Economy: The Case of Armenia’s Local Development Programs

  • Black Sea Regional Studies
  • Published:
Transition Studies Review

Abstract

Based on a data set of 217 communities in Armenia, this paper studies the choice of priority directions in local development programs in the years 2003–2005. The scope of programs is presented and discussed relative to good practices in local development. It is shown that a disproportionately high share of programs is directed at improving local infrastructures, against the principles of good practices. Furthermore, the responsiveness to community needs of local development programs is explored for the case of drinking water infrastructure projects. This paper provides suggestive evidence for program responsiveness, which further increases with an increase in newspaper circulation in a community.

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Notes

  1. According to Ahmad et al. (2005), in the last quarter century over 75 countries have made an attempt to decentralize governance responsibilities.

  2. Some of the analytical materials written on the subject of decentralization have been published by the Community Finance Officers Association under edition of Tumanyan (2004, 2005a, b).

  3. Provinces do not constitute a separate level of government—their function is to implement central government’s territorial policy and act as a link between the central and local governments.

  4. The 11th province, capital Yerevan, is excluded due to unavailability of data.

  5. Out of all the urban communities, only Gyumri, Vanadzor and Dastakert were excluded from the survey.

  6. There are many missing variables in the database significantly limiting its use.

  7. Due to missing values, there are a total of 575 choices of priority directions in the sample.

  8. Most of the reviewed development programs relied on expected funding from the World Bank-supported Armenia Social Investment Fund for implementation of their suggested programs. Other donor organisations assisting with community development programs include OXFAM, USAID, Save the Children Fund, All Armenia Fund, etc.

  9. The analysis is restricted to the case of drinking water mainly due to availability of data on penetration rates of this public good: the share of population with safe water access. While data per capita stock of infrastructure is available for some public goods (e.g. number of schools per child), the choice of this type of indicator may help better capture the criterion of public service use by population.

  10. All the variables come from the Community database. Log population is the log of total community population. Population density is the number of total population divided by the land area of each community. Log income is the log of total income in the community budgets in 2001. Income from central government is the share of transfers from the central government (including subsidies and loans from the state budget) in the total community income in 2001.

  11. As the dependent variable takes on ordinal values, ordered logit models are estimated. Since parameters presented in the Table are measured in logits, their magnitudes are difficult to interpret directly. Exponentiating estimated coefficients yields the multiplicative factor by which a 1 unit increase in an independent variable changes on average the odds of the categorical dependent variable taking on its next-greater value.

  12. Examples of studies on the importance of information and media in public policy choices include Strömberg (2001), Besley and Burgess (2002), Majumdar et al. (2004).

  13. Provincial press is the frequency of availability of daily provincial newspapers in the community (from NHDS2). The variable takes the values of 0 (newspapers are not available), 1 (available not more than once a month), 2 (available several times per month), 3 (available once per week), 4 (available some days per week), 5 (available every day). As the last column of Table 4 demonstrates, the average community in the sample has access to provincial press less than several times a month (the mean value of provincial newspaper circulation is 1.778).

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Acknowledgments

This paper builds on my research completed under the Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative Policy Fellowship 2005/2006. I thank Scott Abrams and Gwen Swinburn for their excellent guidance and the participants of the Fellowship workshops for valuable input. Earlier drafts of this work have benefited from comments from the participants of the UNU-WIDER project workshop ‘Beyond the Tipping Point: Development in an Urban World’ and the 16th NISPAcee Annual Conference. I am indebted to Nairuhi Jrbashyan and Vahan Movsisyan for their generous support in providing access to data. I thank Anne Graham and Clas Weber for their comments on later drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Children and Young People, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia

    Astghik Mavisakalyan

  2. Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Astghik Mavisakalyan

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  1. Astghik Mavisakalyan
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Correspondence to Astghik Mavisakalyan.

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Mavisakalyan, A. Development Priorities in an Emerging Decentralized Economy: The Case of Armenia’s Local Development Programs. Transit Stud Rev 20, 105–118 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11300-013-0263-9

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