Decentralization is often justified as a way of managing national economic development more effectively or efficiently But it is obvious that governments in developing countries that have tried to decentralize during the 1970s and 1980s have not always had effectiveness or efficiency as their primary goals They have rarely embarked on a course of decentralization primarily for economic reasons. Indeed, the economic impacts of decentralization have not usually been calculated beforehand. Thus, recent experiments with decentralization cannot be assessed entirely by economic criteria In many countries decentralization is pursued in reaction to the technical failures of comprehensive national development planning or the weak impact of multisectoral macroeconomic development programming Neither of these have significantly increased the ability of central governments to formulate articulate, and implement national development policies (Rondinelli 1978) Decentralization is often seen as a way of increasing the ability of central government officials to obtain better and less suspect information about local or regional conditions to plan local programs more responsively, and to react more quickly to unanticipated problems that inevitably arise during implementation (Maddick 1963). In theory, decentralization should allow projects to be completed sooner by giving local managers greater discretion in decisionmaking so as to enable them to cut through the "red tape and the ponderous procedures often associated with overcentralized administrations (Rondinelli 1981a)