ABSTRACT
No government, even the most authoritarian, can ever take all public decisions at the centre. Some power has therefore to be given to authorities below the national level to take the decisions which the centre cannot take. From this general remark emerges the idea of decentralization, an idea which can, of course, take many forms and vary markedly in extent. The concepts of centralization and decentralization can be formulated simply in a general manner: if we list all the decisions taken in a country by all the public bodies, that country tends to be centralized if the proportion of the decisions taken by the central authorities is large to very large, and tends, on the contrary, to be decentralized if the proportion is small to very small (Fleiner Gerster, 1987).
