France has long been a highly centralized country, and Paris has come to be identified with a powerful central state, drawing to itself much of the talent and vitality of the provinces.
That doesn't make it any less national, since France is a completely centralized country.
Foreign aid groups here say that Haiti differs from other poor nations recently struck by natural disasters, like Pakistan and Bangladesh, in that the quake gutted the education system of the capital in a highly centralized country.
Peru has long been a highly centralized country, with Lima holding one-third of the country's population and controlling more than half of Peru's economic output, and Mr. Toledo had strongly campaigned for the creation of regional governments to provide more power to people in the country's vast outback.
"There is a lack of competition and critical evaluation in Japan," said Ikuo Kushiro, director of the Institute of Frontier Research of Earth Evolution, a former vice president of Tokyo University, whose role in this highly centralized country roughly approximates that of Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. combined.
As the authors themselves say, Peru is a heavily centralized country, as Lima concentrates about a third of the country's population and used to represent more than 70%% of national expenditure.
The country, like its neighbors, has relied heavily on foreign investment to rebuild itself from the ruins of the formerly centralized state economy.
This contrasts with the behaviour in decentralized Anglo-Saxon economies, and unionized centralized Nordic countries.
He centralized the country's political system, changed its constitution, and allied with the Soviet Union.
