Modern ‘Fiscal Decentralization’ and A Monopolistic Competition Model of Local Public Goods Incorporating External Scale Economies

Abstract

Regarding recently increasing governance phenomena, this article examines the modern conception of ‘fiscal decentralization,’ drawing on previous major theoretical discussions over centuries especially from a perspective of political economy. As the financial and economic component of ‘autonomy,’ fiscal decentralization may embrace both the technocratic and systematic notion of ‘management’ and governmental and legitimate notion of ‘political power.’ In this regard, the essence of this political economic component of autonomy lies local governments’ endogenous growth in their economy and finance from internalizing external economies of scale under monopolistic competition among themselves through multilayered and pluralist ‘economic’ governance whose dynamics are nested constestingly within the central government. The representative political economic agent to determine the eventual allocation of resources in this dynamics is an innovated Tieboutian consumer-voter revealing preferences for local public goods according to their increasing ‘regional ability to pay’ (RAP) when external economies of scale are internalised to expand the ‘scale’ of regional economies or finances under monopolistic competition. This simplified new ‘monopolistic competition’ model of local public goods distinguishes the (long-run) fixed cost of local public fixed asset or (social overhead) capital from the scale-variant variable cost of local public service although its basic aggregate structure of linear function of output and consumption originates from the canonical functions of the ‘new economic geography.’ Our model of local public goods newly embraces externalities, and scale economies under monopolistic competition, although its welfare analysis, whose in-depth analytics and theoretical and policy implications are to be further investigated in subsequent research, have not presented.