Replication Data for: The Decentralization of Death? Local Budgets and Organized Crime Violence

Fiscal decentralization theory calls for enhanced local revenue and spending responsibilities in order to promote the efficiency of public service delivery. However, some have pointed to the danger of local capture canceling out these effects. I test the argument that organized crime violence intensifies as mafias fight for access to local governments’ resources which they consider to be an attractive income source. I regress violence on local spending in Mexican municipalities over the period 1995-2015. I find a significant relationship between local spending and the intensity of violence: higher levels of local spending per capita are strongly related to higher levels of homicide rates, conditional on them being positive. Local spending, however, does not determine the probability of organized crime violence taking place in the first place. The results suggest that caution should be exercised when initiating decentralization reforms in the context of local capture and organized crime violence.