Author Description

"The Distribution of Powers and Responsibilities theme process was led by Akhtar Majeed. It featured 11 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, Switzerland, and United States. Under this theme, there was an in-depth examination of: the distribution of governmental, political, monetary, fiscal, administrative, and policy responsibilities in each federal country (including legislative, executive and judicial); symmetry and asymmetry in the distribution of responsibilities; the reasons and ways in which responsibilities are explicitly and implicitly exclusive and/or concurrent and/or shared in the constitution; the reasons and ways in which responsibilities become divided and/or shared in actual intergovernmental practice; current controversies over the division and/or sharing of responsibilities; assessment of the exclusive and concurrent exercise of responsibilities. Given that there is an extensive literature on the theory of the distribution of responsibilities, especially fiscal responsibilities in federal systems, the book from this theme process includes theoretical models with discussions of how and why each federal country conforms to and departs from the models."--Publisher's website.