In this article, the authors consider issues of fiscal decentralization in the context of sustainable development of territories, justify the development trends of the world community in providing public goods for the population. The analysis of this issues is carried out in comparison of indicators for Russia and the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This allows assessing the current level of fiscal decentralization in the world community, in Russia, and also determining its prospects. The authors presented the results of the study, which contain the dynamics of subnational budgets of Russia and OECD countries, separately identified local budgets, the dynamics of financing of proactive budgeting, the typology of the main projects of proactive budgeting, examples of municipal-private partnership projects implemented in Russia. In addition, the article sets out new approaches to the financial support of local government activities in the country, based on the introduction of self-taxation, bond loans and other forms of financing at the municipal level.
Olena Chygryn, Yuriy Petrushenko, Alina Vysochyna, Анна Воронцова
Testing the hypothesis of FD's positive influence on different parameters of social and economic development was realized on the base of panel data analysis for the set of European countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey and Ukraine). Methodologically it was realized through the using of panel data regression model (independent variablesmeasures of fiscal decentralization, dependent variablesmeasures of social or economic development) in Stata 12/SE. This research allowed to confirm the hypothesis on positive impact of different measures of fiscal decentralization on GDP, GDP growth rate, foreign direct investments, and social contributions. Nevertheless, negative impact of fiscal decentralization on GNI per capita and export of goods and services was found. Besides, increase of public finance centralization stimulates inflation. There was identified controversial impact of different parameters of fiscal decentralization on dynamic of import of goods and services, accordingly.
The local government administrations in Romania have become more visible for taxpayers lately, once the decentralization process has developed. The interest in knowing how local government resources are used has increased, especially after diversifying and increasing funding sources. The present paper presents a detailed analysis of the public revenues and expenditures for the territorial administrative units in Romania. A number of local public finance problems are highlighted: the decrease of public investment, the budget imbalances, the increase of transfers from the state budget, etc., which have been worsened by some legislative changes in recent years.
The purpose of the study is to investigate a financial component of interbudget relations in Ukraine in part of providing and improving the horizontal equalization of regional budgets under the conditions of decentralization. We aim to measure horizontal fiscal imbalance in Ukraine before and after implementation of the decentralization reform: the changes in the horizontal levelling of regional budgets in pre-reform period and during a period of budgetary decentralization. The methodology of the research is based on the theory of public finance, in particular on the theory of fiscal federalism. Study uses the estimation of the statistical data of the authorized bodies related to the distribution of the state budget funds over the regions of Ukraine. The time interval of the research is four years (2015-2018) due to the starting time of implementation of the decentralization reform in Ukraine and the availability of published statistical information. Software packages MS Excel 2016 and SSPSS Statistics 17.0, StatGraphics Plus 5.0 are used for economic-statistical calculations. Such analysis is conducted using the methods of synthesis, tabular, graphic, cluster and correlation analysis. The constrains of the study are related to the incomplete statistical data of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, the State Treasury Service of Ukraine and the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine. Results. It is proved that the equalization subsidy was the main tool for equalizing of the revenue part of local budgets. It formed about a quarter of revenue of local budgets and about half of official transfers of local budgets. It is found out that horizontal imbalance is much lower after the decentralization reform in Ukraine: after reforming the horizontal equalization, the absolute volume of the horizontal equalization decreased by 11.5 times, relative indicators decreased by 15 times. A detailed analysis reveals the existence of imbalances in the horizontal equalization of regional budgets in Ukraine in 2015-2018. Furthermore, the present system of horizontal equalization is ineffective according to the criterion of fiscal efficiency and contradicts a basic approach of budget decentralization. Four budget clusters are identified based on the criterion of distribution of basic subsidy: 1-st cluster of budgets with average size of basic subsidy (budgets of Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Chernigiv, Kirovograd, Khmelnytsky, Mykolayiv and Cherkasy regions); 2-nd cluster of budgets with minimum amounts of basic subsidy (budgets of Luhansk and Sumy regions), and with the change of directions of horizontal equalizationts (budgets of Donetsk, Kharkiv, Odesa and Lviv regions); 3-rd cluster of budgets with maximum size of the basic subsidy (regional budgets of Volyn, Rivne, Kherson, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Zakarpattia and Chernivtsi regions); 4-th cluster of budgets of those who transfered a reverse grant to the State Budget of Ukraine (budgets of Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv and Poltava regions). Practical meaning. The directions of improvement of the horizontal equalization of regional budgets in Ukraine are substantiated, among them: introduction of the index of horizontal equalization; constance of approaches to horizontal equalization for three years according to requirements of medium-term budget planning and sustainable development of regions; extending the interval of the index of horizontal levelling. The prospects for further study are related to the justification of the mechanism of financial provision of local government in the context of implementation policy of decentralization.
Michael Alexeev, Nikolay Avxentyev, Arseny Mamedov, Sergey Sinelnikov-Murylev
Using a panel of Russian regions, we estimate the link between intraregional fiscal decentralization and regional budget deficits. Although Russia’s regions are not as autonomous (either politically or fiscally) as regions in some other federal states, we obtain robust and statistically and economically significant results. Specifically, expenditure decentralization has a positive effect on consolidated regional budget balances, while transfer dependence of municipalities is associated with higher deficits. The impact of revenue decentralization depends on whether a regional government can use its tax revenue assignments with the same high degree of discretion that generally characterizes explicit fiscal transfers. We show that a 2009 local finance reform that limited the discretion of regional governments to assign regional tax revenue to municipalities has changed the effect of tax decentralization on budget discipline.
Bahl and Bird’s book aims ambitiously to be a panacea for all that is unwell in fiscal decentralisation. It maps the appropriate fiscal structures and relationships between central and local govern...
This paper examines the relationship between fiscal federalism and social policy in India through an analysis of the effects of a recent effort to increase fiscal decentralization to state governments on the nature of social policy investment at the sub-national level. Through its analysis, this paper highlights the persistence of a strong centralisation bias in India’s fiscal architecture for social policy. We trace this centralisation bias to the political and administrative dynamics of the federal bargain. The peculiar dynamics of this bargain have created a context where the core goal of centralization – to ensure equity – is undermined while the expectation of decentralization – greater accountability through alignment of expenditure with local needs and preferences, fails to take root. India is thus likely to continue to witness significant regional variation in social policy outcomes, despite a centralised financing architecture.
Sajitha Bashir, Marlaine E. Lockheed, Elizabeth Ninan, Jee‐Peng Tan
Addresses issues of governance, financing, and managing resources for education in Sub-Saharan Africa, where severe deficiencies in public financial management (PFM) processes affect the efficacy of resource use and do not consider the specific requirements of the education sector. Though governments have devoted sizable and increasing resources to increase access to primary education, current expenditure patterns reflect policy choices made in the past. Almost all government spending on education gets absorbed by teachers’ salaries, with little spent on complementary inputs deemed critical to improving quality. Public spending on education is distributed highly unequally among household income quintiles because almost no students from the lowest quintiles attain upper-secondary or tertiary education. Decentralization initiatives have become widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa, including decentralization to subnational and local governments; more directly, to schools, through various forms of school grants; and, in a few cases, to non-state actors such as private providers or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
Paolo Chiades, Luciano Greco, Vanni Mengotto, Luigi Moretti · 5 authors
For the period 2003–2014, we investigate unexplored effects of fiscal consolidation in decentralized public finance on a large dataset of Italian municipalities. Based on a simple, realistic theoretical model, we show that municipalities increase arrears on committed investment expenditure as a response to intergovernmental transfer cuts. Then, we test our predictions controlling for potential sources of endogeneity, and find that a reduction in intergovernmental transfers causes a significant increase in arrears, in addition to other common adjustments to local fiscal policies (e.g., tax revenues). Our results highlight a perverse effect of fiscal consolidation packages implemented by centrally imposed fiscal restraints.
China initiated a major decentralization reform in recent years to simultaneously improve tax autonomy and fiscal transfers toward county governments. We use an instrumental variables strategy and a county-level panel dataset for years 1995-2014 to examine the incentive effects of the reform. We find that the reform significantly reduced tax enforcement of the county governments, for which the result appears to be driven by the opposing incentive effects of the increased local tax autonomy and fiscal transfers. In particular, while the reform motivated county governments to improve tax enforcement by enhancing local tax autonomy, it dampened local tax enforcement because of the increased fiscal transfers. Our findings provide support to the argument in the decentralization literature that improving local tax autonomy, compared to increasing fiscal transfers, is a more effective way to finance local governments while strengthening local fiscal discipline.
The objective of this paper is to examine whether the level of fiscal decentralization of a country is a relevant variable to explain public investment in innovation (measured as the share of research and development (R&D) spending in total government budget) and the intensity of basic research within the public R&D bundle. To assess the effects of decentralization, we present a theoretical model where a 'benevolent government' invests in R&D aiming at maximizing net income available in the country (central government) or in the respective region (subnational government), states compete to attract capital investment, and R&D results are subject to interregional knowledge spillovers. According to the model, decentralization leads to a lower share of basic research in government innovation spending. The impact on total R&D is ambiguous, although it tends to be negative. The conclusions of the model are tested through an empirical analysis using country aggregate data. Confirming the predictions of the model, we find evidence that expenditure decentralization leads to lower intensity of basic research within public R&D, and that both types of decentralization negatively affect the size of innovation spending. Our findings suggest that deepening fiscal decentralization should be considered along with measures to compensate for innovation spending decrease, and that the central government should play a greater role in financing or carrying out basic research.
This article analyses the impact of state decentralization on one aspect of territorial diversity, specifically on the policy discretion of regions, as an expression of their political autonomy for self-government. Our interest focuses on the factors that determine the decisions and actions of regional governments in developing their policies. We ask: why do regional governments take different public policy options? Conceding that several factors help explain policy decisions (such as productive structure, government ideology, social capital, political context, budgetary resources), we choose to explore the impact of two of them, by asking: in what way, and to what extent, are policy decisions and actions conditioned by the financing model and by their different ideologies? We present quantitative and qualitative comparative evidence from two contrasting case studies: two regions in decentralized Spain that have developed their own policies of income and spending, and have translated them into differing public management policies and regulatory models for providing health services. These governments are ideologically different and have undergone different degrees of recent ideological changes, but the resources provided to them by the financing model have also been different. We show how resources determine the scope of governments’ actions, while ideology determines their direction.
This thesis analyzes whether the fiscal relations between the central and local governments of Turkey can be solely explained by socio-economic and demographic factors or the regional and political positions of cities also affect it.We use a balanced panel dataset consisting of all of the 81 cities of Turkey over the years 2008-2012.Our main dependent variables are transfers and government compensation.We define government compensation as the total government spending made in a city excluding local own revenues.Other fiscal aggregates such as local own revenues and expenditures, or fiscal indicators such as fiscal decentralization and financial independence, defined as the share of local governments spending financed by its own revenues, are also analyzed.Regression analysis and robustness tests showed the following: (i) Socio-economic structure of cities are significantly associated with the amount of transfers and government compensation; which means that the transfer rule of Turkey, as an institutional mechanism, is quite successful addressing regional socio-economic differences.Besides, there is no robust effect of political parties on the amount of transfers and government compensation.(ii) Our analysis also shows that there is a significant association between political parties and local expenditures, revenues, and expenditure decentralization.
Although China¡¯s asymmetric fiscal decentralization system has been criticized for many years, there have been few studies giving direct evidence of its negative incentives on local government spending policies. By introducing the mechanism of asymmetric decentralization and fiscal transfers to the objective function of local government, this paper studies the incentive effects of asymmetric decentralization and fiscal transfers on spending policies of local governments, and uses the provincial panel data to carry out an empirical test. The conclusion shows that the asymmetric decentralization significantly weakens the incentives of local government to increase social expenditure, and as a solution to asymmetric decentralization, fiscal transfers fail to play a good role. Due to the relatively large income effect, the financing mechanism of fiscal transfers not only significantly reduces the incentives of local government to provide social public goods, but also weakens the constraint effect of fiscal competition on expenditure policies of local governments because of the increase in the relative cost. Although the distribution mechanism of fiscal transfers has a significant positive incentive to local government in regions where the net inflow of fiscal resources is more than zero, because of common pooling effects, the comprehensive effects of fiscal transfers in the distribution of incentives of local governments to provide social public goods are negative in all regions.
Nikos Tsakiris, Panos Hatzipanayotou, Michael S. Michael
Abstract We build a two asymmetric regions model with cross‐border pollution related to production. Each region issues emission permits and revenues from their sales finance public pollution abatement. The decentralized level of emission permits is efficient when permits are interregionally tradable and cross‐border pollution is perfect. This result is robust in a variety of cases—for example, when (i) capital is immobile or internationally mobile or only mobile between the two regions, and (ii) revenue from permits sales is transferred to a federal authority.
Purpose-The financial aspect of local government autonomy is considered a very important topic in the public finance literature especially for the developing countries. Fiscal autonomy empowers the local government units with the right means to provide better services for the community and to proper allocate the funds based on the citizens needs. The purpose of this paper is to study the level of financial autonomy in Albanian municipalities and compare the characteristics within different units of local government. Methodology-In this paper we analyze the financial autonomy of Albanian municipalities by proposing an index to compare the governmental units and classify them in four classes according to the degree of autonomy. Seven quantitative indicators are used in the index, with different importance coefficients. Findings-In Albania, while important progress has been made on advancing the decentralization reform in the last decade, autonomy of local government still remains a challenge. Local authorities do not have appropriate financial resources and they are depended on transfers from the central government budget.
The study aims to determine the opinions of school principals on decentralization in education. Phenomenological research design was used in the study. The purposive sampling methods of convenience and criterion samplings were used together. The study group was composed of six volunteer principals. The data were collected through individual face-to-face interviews using a semi-structured form. Descriptive analysis and inductive content analysis were used. In conclusion, from a holistic perspective, most of the participants found the concept of decentralization to be close to full autonomy which is usually perceived as dangerous in terms of the unitary state structure. Therefore, they have more centralized attitudes towards educational processes other than financing and infrastructure support regarding decentralization in education. This is indeed an indication that concerns regarding decentralization in education are high. The participants think that decentralization will not harm our national identity and the national education structure is beneficial.
Abstract The present paper describes the trajectory of China's fiscal and tax reform in the past 40 years, which can be summarized in five phases. The reform commenced with “decentralizing power and transferring benefits.” Then, under great fiscal pressure, institutional reform was instigated, which aimed to establish a new fiscal and tax system. To regulate the government revenue and expenditure beyond the fiscal and tax system, reforms were put in place to build an institutional framework for public finance. As the fiscal and tax reform had gradually entered the more sophisticated phases, China took a series of measures to further improve the public finance system. Since 2012, based on the overall plan of comprehensively deepening reform, China has embarked on establishing a modern public finance system. The present paper characterizes China's fiscal and tax reform as gradually moving toward a system that aligns with the overall reform and complements the goal of marketization and modernization of state governance.
Since its independence the Republic of Croatia has commenced a thorough reconstruction of its taxation system according to the market economy taxation policy. Essential taxation reforms have brought the system closer to EU systems i.e. it has been being harmonized with taxation systems of developed European countries. The Republic of Croatia has adopted solutions that are used by the majority of European countries. Current tax system of the Republic of Croatia can be viewed through three fiscal levels, but this paper deals with decentralization and revenue, especially tax revenue of local and regional self-government units. The paper will present importance and a way of collecting revenue, especially tax revenue and satisfying public needs in terms of counties, cities and municipalities. The local and central characteristics of the certain types of taxes and the specialities thereof, as well as the applied functional differences are also scrutinized, and a widely accepted opinion of the taxpayers is explained. Taking these into account, the scientific contribution of this paper is that it provides a basis for further research on tax system development.
Fiscal decentralization aims to improve regional finance independency and reduce the fiscal dependency of central government. However, in practice, there are many areas that still rely on the assistance central finance for their regional development. This research aims to discuss the development of regional finance independency and analyze the influence of regional finance independency on economic growth in Banten Province. This research uses descriptive method and panel data on 6 (six) regencies and cities in Banten Province at 2001-2011. The results showed the significantly positive effect of regional finance independency on economic growth and significantly negative effect of balance fund’s ratio on economic growth. Key words: local revenue, economic growth, panel data
Using soft budget theory to explore the formation mechanism and the deep institutional incentive of the local financing platform debt expansion from the perspective of fiscal / financial decentralization, construct theoretical framework which explain the expansion of local debt financing platform and conduct an empirical test, the results showed that the higher the degree of fiscal decentralization, fiscal autonomy as a soft constraint body of local government the stronger, local financing platform debt scale is greater; the higher the degree of financial decentralization, local government and financial institutions have the higher autonomy with respect to the central, local financing platform debt scale is bigger; financial synergy degree is stronger, local government financial mutual supervision prompted the local government debt more transparency, local debt financing platform size is smaller.
PETER MWIATHI SILAS, Nelson Wawire, Perez Ayieko Onono-Okelo
The Kenya government has instituted fiscal decentralization over the years to promote social economic development, reduce poverty and income inequality and ensure balanced regional development. Despite these efforts, poverty levels have remained high in Kenya. The literature on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and poverty has been rather inconclusive about the effects of fiscal decentralization on poverty. The main objective of this paper was to analyse the effects of fiscal decentralization on poverty in Kenya. Using cross-county panel data from 2002 – 2014 and published data from government agencies, UNDP reports and World Bank reports, the paper estimated various empirical models to analyse the effects intergovernmental transfers, sub-national own-source revenue and county expenditure on poverty in Kenya. The study established that the effect of fiscal decentralization on poverty depends on the nature of decentralization and the extent of fiscal decentralization as well as the county specifics. The paper therefore, recommends the need for for county governments to have adequate own-source revenue to finance their expenditure as opposed to relying on intergovernmental transfers from national government.