Abstract
Spain has gone in very few years from being a unitary and centralised state to being a complex and highly decentralised state at regional level. The autonomous communities have become the main institutional actor and provider of services, consume the majority of public expenditure, and employ the most public employees in the country. However, these communities have specific characteristics that distinguish them from federal models: they have an open structure that lacks the effective coordination mechanisms of decentralised systems. Local governments on the contrary are in a position of normative and financial subordination with respect to the other administrations, which bring into question their viability as institutions capable of delivering effective public services.
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Ruano, J.M. (2017). Functional Federalism in a Complex State: The Case of Spain. In: Ruano, J., Profiroiu, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Decentralisation in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32437-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32437-1_4
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