On the contrary, if subnational units are
highly specialized so that they are not comparable
or if tasks assigned to every official
are idiosyncratic, which implies that shocks
to these tasks are not correlated, such as
ministries in former Soviet Union and
Central-Eastern Europe before 1989, it is
easy for a minister to blame a poor outcome
on bad luck in his industrial sector and it is
difficult to object to his excuse, given that
performance is imperfectly correlated with
officials’ efforts.