Abstract: This paper shows that regional favoritism was relatively subdued in the subnational allocation of development finance in Ethiopia under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government between 1991 and 2019. I argue that the low level of political competition under EPRDF’s one-party regime allowed leaders to avoid the electoral pressures faced by their counterparts in regimes with multi-party democracies, thus making them less likely to overpromise and overspend public resources for electoral cycles. Further, the EPRDF’s state-building efforts through ethnic federalism allowed a relatively balanced ethnolinguistic representation at the top leadership level, ensuring a relatively equitable distribution of development finance proportional to each region’s population and tax revenue. The low level of political competition and relatively balanced elite power-sharing pattern allowed the EPRDF government to centralize rents for its long-term national development plans and constrain regional favoritism.