IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/publus/v30yi2p1-16.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Federalism and Decentralization: Ownership Rights and the Superiority of Federalism

Author

Listed:
  • Albert Breton

Abstract

The benefits and costs usually ascribed to federalism are benefits and costs of decentralization; they are, therefore, present in unitary states that are in fact all decentralized. The benefits and costs specific to federalism pertain to ownership rights in constitutional powers. Federalism is superior to confederalism and unitarianism because the ownership rights peculiar to that system of government are such that they ensure the perdurance of competition when one or more competitors are unsuccessful. They do so because under federalism, powers cannot be repossessed unilaterally. Ownership rights have to be enforced; as a consequence, there are also costs that are specific to federalism. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Albert Breton, 0. "Federalism and Decentralization: Ownership Rights and the Superiority of Federalism," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 30(2), pages 1-16.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:30:y::i:2:p:1-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Breton, Albert & Fraschini, Angela, 2016. "Is Italy a Federal or even a Quasi-Federal State?," POLIS Working Papers 186, Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS.
    2. Aziz, Ghazala & Khan, Mohd Saeed, 2010. "The Dynamics of Fiscal Federalism in India and the Global Financial crises," MPRA Paper 62857, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Garzarelli, Giampaolo, 2018. "Internal Organization in a Public Theory of the Firm: Toward a Coase-Oates Federalism Nexus," MPRA Paper 86955, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Lars P. Feld, 2006. "Regulatory Competition and Federalism in Switzerland: Diffusion by Horizontal and Vertical Interaction," CREMA Working Paper Series 2006-22, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    5. Zhang, Feng & Jiang, Guohua & Cantwell, John A., 2019. "Geographically Dispersed Technological Capability Building and MNC Innovative Performance: The Role of Intra-firm Flows of Newly Absorbed Knowledge," Journal of International Management, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 1-1.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:30:y::i:2:p:1-16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/publius .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.