Coping with Interregional Inequality in Federations: Factors of Political Regimes and Degree of Decentralization

The purpose of the study is to investigate the level of political and fiscal decentralization in combination with the political regime as factors affecting to inter-regional inequality. Using statistical methods based on data by 23 countries from 1990 to 2017, hypotheses were confirmed that for developing countries with flawed democracy or hybrid regimes, decentralization has a negative effect on interregional inequality. While developed democracies continue to decentralize with a system of regional policies and an effective system of fiscal equalization reduce the level of economic and social inequality between regions. Case-study method on the example of Nigeria and Canada revealed the reasons for the effectiveness or inefficiency of the fight against inter-regional inequality in the presence of various constellations of factors.