Validation of the regional authority index

This article validates the Regional Authority Index (RAI) with seven widely used decentralization indices in the literature. A principal axis analysis reveals a common structure. The major source of disagreement between the RAI and the other indices stems from the fact that the RAI does not include local governance, whereas most other indices do. Two other sources of disagreement concern the treatment of federal versus non-federal countries, and countries which have recently regionalized and/or have asymmetrical regions, whereby the more fine-grained RAI captures greater variation. The second part of the article discusses content validity of fiscal indicators.