This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Using case studies from Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Jaipur, and Bangalore,this book examines the causes of poor public service delivery in India scities with specific reference to finances and institutional factors.

The World Bank plays an active role through lending operations and analytical work in support of countries' efforts to address population issues. This study examines those issues in Asia, home to half the world's population, to provide a comparative analysis from a policy perspective. The book is divided into three parts. The first provides the historical context for demographic policies, including a graphic framework based on data from past population growth patterns and fertility rates. The second examines the cost, financing, and organization of family planning programs. The final part assesses population prospects, including the sensitivity of future population sizes to sharp declines in fertility rates, and the implications of growth for the environment, the delivery of social services, employment, and the demand for urban infrastructure.

This paper reviews efforts to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of urban services delivery in developing countries. It argues that failures in urban service delivery are not merely the result of a lack of technical knowledge on the part of local government staff, but also reflect constraints and perverse incentives confronting local personnel and their political leadership, and these, in turn, are often the inadverten result of problems in the relationship between central and local government. The report views the spread of decentralization as a potentially fortuitous phenomenon. The decentralization now occurring is not a carefully designed sequence of reforms aimed at improving the efficiency of public service delivery ; it appears to be a reluctant and disorderly series of concessions by central governments attempting to maintain political stability. (Adapté du résumé de l'auteur).