Parallelogram

An Essay on the Political Economy of Regional Development

Raymond Kaniu

Founder & Executive Director, Strahl Composite

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When was the last time you drew a parallelogram?

A parallelogram is a flat, four-sided geometric shape where both pairs of opposite sides are parallel. It is a shape of balance and elegance.

In 1971 there was an institutional reform of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (CasMez), a major public development fund established by the Italian government between 1950 and 1984 to stimulate economic growth, build infrastructure, and reduce the economic gap between Northern and Southern Italy. The reform abolished the agency's centralized technical autonomy and transferred fund allocation authority to newly created regional governments. After authority moved to regional governments, municipalities closely aligned with the ruling regional party received more CasMez funding than unaligned municipalities.

The reform marked a sharp change in the program’s governance: authority over the allocation of funds was transferred from an autonomous central committee of technicians to the newly established regional governments. Approximately 5600 digitized archival data on local political administrations in the 1960-1984 era, was applied, including data from the Archives of Territorial Economic Development (ASET), with a narrow focus on 374 municipalities with at least 10,000 inhabitants in 1971, which account for the core of the program’s industrialization effort.

The study sought to understand how centralizing allocation decisions enhance the effectiveness of development spending, how does it increase vulnerability to political distortions? This question is especially relevant in settings where governments decentralize development policy in presence of weak administrative capacity and fragile accountability, like Kenya.

Allow me to draw the parallels:

Following Kenya's first general election under the 2010 Constitution of Kenya, a legal framework for a devolved system of governance with 47 county governments was implemented. Since then, cumulative disbursements to county governments have crossed the KSh 4 trillion mark, with annual equitable share allocations steadily increasing alongside shifting parliamentary majorities. However, that could not be studied in detail due to the lack of credible records until another president took office.

On June 30, 2023, months after taking over the presidency, President William Ruto launched the massive digitization of government services. His administration moved over 5,000 services onto the eCitizen platform. More services have been on-boarded through subsequent deadlines targeting all remaining state departments and resistant agencies, scaling the digital catalog past 25,000 to over 30,000 services. The digitization of records will grant the government valuable data on governance.

Soon Kenya will be able to do a similar study like the one Tancredi Buscemi and Giulia Romani did on the same subject, devolution. Their findings suggested that devolving allocation authority to sub-national governments is especially costly when three conditions hold simultaneously: broad discretionary power over fund allocation, weak accountability mechanisms, and strong electoral incentives at the local or regional level. They determined that when these conditions coincide, decentralization can transform a development program into an instrument of patronage, diverting resources away from their stated objectives and toward the consolidation of political power.

The study revealed that centralization always dominates decentralization, but that transferring authority without adequate institutional safeguards can undermine the developmental goals of public investment programs. Furthermore, tactical redistribution appears most pronounced in municipalities characterized by higher historical corruption and larger electorates, suggesting that the costs of poorly designed decentralization infrastructures are concentrated in areas where institutional fragility is greatest, which are often precisely the areas that place-based policies are meant to support. This calls for particular attention to the governance structures applied in the most vulnerable territories, rather than uniform institutional arrangements across heterogeneous contexts. Another parallel.

Works Cited:

Buscemi, T., & Romani, G. (2026). The political economy of regional development: Evidence from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno. Journal of Development Economics, (103900). https://doi.org/10.1016/

President Ruto Unveils Online Government Services. (n.d.). The Official Website of the President of the Republic of Kenya. https://www.president.go.ke/president-ruto-unveils-online-government-services/

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