The implementation of regional autonomy has implications for the transfer of authority between the center and the regions in various fields. The existence of regional autonomy will result in decentralization which involves the management of regional finances, economic planning, including arranging regional development programs and other plans delegated from the center to the regions. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth and the index of human development in districts and cities in North Maluku Province. The population of this study consisted of 7 districts and 2 cities. The data is secondary data for the period 2011 to 2015, sourced from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) Jakarta, districts and cities in North Maluku Province, published. The collected data were analyzed using path analysis techniques using the SPSS program package. The results of the study indicate that the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth had a positive path coefficient with a level of probability which was not significant. This shows that hypothesis one which states that fiscal decentralization has a significant effect on the economic growth of districts and cities in North Maluku Province. These results suggest that the higher the fiscal decentralization, the higher the economic growth. The effect of fiscal decentralization on the human development index has a positive path coefficient with a significant level of probability. This implies that the higher the fiscal decentralization, the higher the human development index. The effect of economic growth on the human development index has a positive coefficient with a significant level of probability. These results indicate that the higher the economic growth, the higher the index of human development.

Regional autonomy is designed to increase the welfare of the community with the idea that regional government best understands what must be done in order to increase and improve human resources. The quality of human resources in a community can be a determining factor for the success of development initiatives in a region. Regional governments must be able to properly plan, to implement, and to evaluate regional budget allocations as they have direct impacts on regional gross regional domestic product (GRDP) as well as on measurable community welfare as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI). This study examines the relationship between government spending and human development in regional governments of Papua Province, Indonesia as measured by the HDI. A secondary analysis of government data and Human Development Index (HDI) data was conducted using structural equation modelling. The secondary analysis of regional government budget allocations and HDI data suggests that spending with the goal of improving the lives of community members seems to lead to an improvement of HDI. This study is focused on regional governments in one province of Indonesia. While its findings suggest that governments should make supporting human resources a priority if they hope to see improvement in HDI, similar studies should be conducted in other communities in order to see how different cultural or political settings affect the relationship between spending and HDI. This study adds to our understanding of development with its focus on Papua Province, an under-studied area in development research.

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income indices, which is implemented to rank countries into different items of human development including life expectancy, education, living standards. This paper uses fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to rank five influencing factors including income, culture, healthcare, knowledge and civil rights in Iran. Using a questionnaire in linguistic form, the study asks some experts to make judgment about the relative importance of each pair of five items and it ranks them based on fuzzy AHP technique. The results indicate that income is number priority followed by knowledge, culture, civil rights and healthcare affairs.