Ejaz Ghani, Lakshmi Iyer, Saurabh Mishra The last two decades have seen an upsurge in research on the relationship between institutions and economic development (e.g. Acemoglu et al. 2001, Easterly 2001, Rodrik et al. 2004). This literature finds that higher quality governments lead to better provision of public goods, improved resource allocation, and more efficient democratic processes. Most of these studies, however, have been focussed on national-level institutions. Despite a global trend to devolution, sub-national governments have been largely neglected. Only recently have studies begun to focus on sub-national government, generally finding that differences in quality at this level shape differences in regional economic performance in places like Europe (e.g. Rothstein et al. 2013, Charron et al. 2014, Rodríguez–Pose and Garcilazo 2015) or China (e.g. Cai and Treisman 2005, Cole et al. 2009, Rodríguez–Pose and Zhang 2019).