The political and economic benefits of decentralization have been cogently represented, to the extent that decentralization and devolution comprise identifiable programs of reform across a range of polities. However, the public policy question of finance following function â and the oversight of this process â is less resolved. Further, concerns over the financial sustainability of sub-national governments continue across a range of polities. Against the backdrop of reforms to municipal finance in both Australia and China, this chapter provides an account of the formation and functioning of two successful sub-national financial institutions, the Local Government Finance Authority of South Australia (LGFA) and the Municipal Finance Authority of British Colombia. The case studies suggest that sub-national finance may not be the thorn in the side of decentralization it sometimes appears to be. The broader introduction of such financial instruments is considered.
The economic empowerment of urban local bodies is essential for the effective delivery of urban development programmes. These institutions are to be provided adequate financial resources to carry out various development activities in the cities. They are to be empowered to raise tax and collect fees from their municipal areas and also get due share of the grant-in-aid from the central and provincial governments in time. The financial aspects of intergovernmental relations veritably influence the nature, scope, and depth of democratic decentralization. Urban finances are critical elements in sustainable urban development. Moreover, effective and efficient urban financial management system will go a long way to improve the financial health of the local bodies. It would enhance their economic competitiveness; make the delivery of urban services effective; expand and diversify their revenue; and generate fund through capital investments. Thus, municipal finance is one of the most important areas of the urban development system. Smart urban finance is the key requirement without which the quality of life of people in urban areas cannot be effectively improved.
Recently, fiscal decentralization, which involves the devolution of government fiscal responsibilities to lower levels of government, has been discussed in many developed and developing countries. In particular, the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth is a key issue in recent theoretical and empirical studies in public finance. The empirical evidences produce mixed results. In this study, the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth in a sample of several provinces will be explored. A province study offers several advantages: a bigger sample of data is available for province than for Indonesia; and panel data estimation is able to adjust the cultural, historical, and institutional differences and also to capture the local heterogeneities. By adopting a production-function-based estimation framework, the empirical estimation is done on a sample of cross section data that comprises of 26 province governments and the time series yearly data from 1992 to 2002. The Generalized Least Square method is used to test these data. The results indicate that: first, the fiscal decentralization variables (expenditure indicator) show the positive and significant coefficients, while, the revenue indicator shows the negative relationship with economic growth. Hence, several policy implications can be derived; i.e, the local government should be able: to increase their non taxes revenues; to create conducive conditions for capital inflows; and to develop a clear framework for fiscal decentralization assignment such as income redistribution and borrowingJEL classification: E60; E62; H62; H63; 04Keywords: province government financing; fiscal decentralization;localautonomy;fiscal policy; economic growth; cross-province data;
Spatial interaction among local governments in fiscal setting decisions is receiving increasingly attention in the applied public economics literature. Spatial interaction models rely on the presence of an externality from local budget making, that is external effects originate from inter-jurisdictional resource flows due to tax competition for a mobile base, or from local public expenditure spillovers into neighboring jurisdictions. Similarly, the intergovernmental grants competition exists when there is a rivalry among local governments to get them from central government. This paper attempted to identify how great the fiscal competition among local governments in Indonesia. Using spatial statistics, we concluded that the fiscal competition among municipalities was greater compared to the pre fiscal decentralization period. It seems that the local tax setting and expenditures decisions in particular municipality can be attributed to the mimicking behavior to neighbor regions. Also, we found that the fiscal competition among municipalities could be attributed negatively to the fiscal disparity. Those imply that in the regional autonomy era the local governments tend to increase their local own revenue intensively and demand for intergovernmental grants in order to finance their expenditures. In the long run, they could lead to the high cost economy, worsening fiscal dependency, and inefficiency of local government expenditures. Those findings above suggest that the distribution of intergovernmental transfers among regions should consider the local tax effort and the services minimum standard plays an important role to achieve the efficiency of local government expenditures.
This paper examines the effects of fiscal decentralization on the education sector for a sample of 62 countries. The results suggest that different sources of fiscal decentralization have distinct effects on education expenditure and quality. While subnational governments that are financed through own-tax revenues are more likely to increase the funds allocated to education, they also seem less concerned with maintaining teaching quality. This study provides evidence that decentralized structures cater better to local social needs. Fiscal decentralization is, therefore, an important policy instrument for achieving social goals.
âPromotion tournament modelâ is used to explain the Chinese economic miracle. The key of the promotion tournament model is competition for economic growth which brings economic growth together with some societal problems. Competition for economic growth influences local governmentsâ behavior and is one of the reasons for the rapid rising of local debts. The article proposes a new competition modelâcompetition for inhabitantsâ satisfaction. It is a better choice under the system of political centralization with fiscal decentralization in China. It gives inhabitants the right to supervise the government officials while the central government has the power of appointment. Competition for inhabitantsâ satisfaction changes the local governmentsâ investment and finance behaviors, which is meaningful to improve Chinaâs local government debt governance.
Wu Jinglian, Ma Guochuan, Xiaofeng Hua, Nancy Hearst
Abstract Because the decentralized âfiscal contracting systemâ of the 1980s benefited local officials, their motivation to undertake reform and development increased. However, the system also fostered local protectionism and market fragmentation. Problems were even more conspicuous in terms of the sharing of revenue. In 1994, the âall-round fiscal contractingâ was replaced by tax sharing between the central and sub-central governments, based on a reasonable division of revenue and expenditures. The design of the new system allowed for numerous intragovernmental transfers to facilitate an equitable provision of public services. The tax-sharing reform was the most far-reaching institutional change after the establishment of the Peopleâs Republic because it adjusted the distribution of existing interests. After this reform, Chinaâs fiscal and taxation systems were compatible with institutions in the market economies.
The paper provides empirical evidence on the association between decentralization and fiscal performance of the general government on a panel of 11 former transition countries during 1996-2012, controlling for the effects of various demographic, institutional, and macroeconomic variables. Also, for robustness check we make a comparison with a panel of 18 industrialized European economies. The main findings from the empirical investigation suggest that decentralizing government activities in Central and Eastern Europe leads to an increase in the efficiency in the provision of public goods. Also, we show that not only the extent of fiscal decentralization, but the composition of local revenue, too, matters for fiscal discipline. In these regards, providing local governments with higher autonomy in financing their activities by relying more on their âownâ tax revenues instead of intergovernmental grants seems to be conducive with fiscal discipline. In contrast to the sample consisting of the former transition economies, we cannot find evidence on the association between decentralization and fiscal discipline in the developed European countries.
The fiscal incentives literature emphasizes how the design of transfer systems has a significant implication on the behavior of local governments within decentralized systems. The empirical findings on the relationship between intergovernmental transfers and the incentives they create for local revenue generation are inconclusive and differ from country to country. Given the lack of data on local public finances, this type of study rarely involves developing countries. Using a unique and rich socio-economic and public finance data covering a large set of Moroccan municipalities over the period 2005 to 2009, this paper contributes to the new generation of fiscal federalism literature by assessing the fiscal incentive effects of two types of transfers: general purpose transfers (unconditional) defined by a formula and specific purpose transfers (conditional) allocated on an ad-hoc basis. After correcting for the endogeneity problem, our findings support the existence of a significant incentive effect of unconditional transfers and a less robust effect of conditional transfers. Suggesting that transfers from the central government complement local own revenues by encouraging Moroccan municipalities to collect more revenues.
This paper aims at investigating the impact of fiscal decentralization on two key social services: education and healthcare outcomes. We use both a simple time series data set and panel data set covering four provinces of Pakistan over the period from 1975 to 2009 to empirically test the impact of fiscal decentralization on infant mortality rate, crude death rate and literacy rate. Besides Ordinary Least Square method we use Generalized Method of Moment econometric technique to obtain robust and consistent results. The empirical findings of this paper indicate that fiscal decentralization is effective in enhancing the delivery and augmenting the quality of education and healthcare services. These findings are important because they suggest, contrary to the traditional public finance theory, that provincial governments can play a far better role in improving the social services delivery like basic education and healthcare compare to federal government.
âAre fiscally decentralized countries inherently more unstable? Or is it a question of the design of decentralization, requiring, for example, higher subnational revenue autonomy and hard budget constraints? The ongoing euro crisis offers an assortment of relevant country case studies to test some of those important propositions. This volume provides authoritative and insightful assessments of how decentralization and macroeconomic stability relate to each other, and significantly contributes to our understanding of multi-level finance and to improving decentralization design.â â Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, Georgia State University, US
Central governments canalize to decentralized organization for compensate public demands faster, high quality and efficiency in globalization process. Local governments take effectively charge in distribution of income, education, health, housing on local basis which are parts of public policy and increasing the welfare level of the citizens of their municipality with their own facilities. The most important mission is incumbent to municipalities which is local governmentsââŹâ˘ type, in decentralized organization. Municipalities have two types incoming source; one of them from central governments sources the other one is internal revenue. This study aims to give information about municipalities which are at the forefront among local governments and property tax which is one of income sources municipalities. In this sense, law no. 5393 which was accepted on the 3rd of July, 2007 was studied in the frame of property tax and information about the phases of municipalities from the foundation up to now and their financial structure was given. Keywords: property tax, local government, decentralization, budget.
Giving local government to arrange regional receipt to purchase expenses bugget is part of Regional Otonomy. Not only depend on Central Government, Government genuine Receipt is one regional receipt that shows how stronger local goverment finance can handled all the expenditure. Metro as a local government in Indonesia, has the increase in regional otonomy espescialy in finance. The higher decentralization is a indicatoin that indicate higher ability on local government to fulfill all expenditure. It can be shown on share of Government Genuine Receipt and Tax and non Tax Share compare Total Regional Receipt and Total Regional Expenditure. Higher fiscal Desentralization needed by Metro to get higher Regional otonomy. Government Genuine Receipt and Tax and non Tax must be increased to get higher regional receipt and increasing share in Total Regional Receipt and higher share to offord the Total Regional Expenditure.
Strong local autonomy or decentralization process became a goal for local governments, but one of the main question in literature remains as how strong must be the local autonomy of expenditures at the local governmentsâ level. Given the great diversity of situations and legal framework over the period after 1990, I consider that Romania must have a stable legal framework regarding local public finances and stable strategy of local development designed to implement a sustainable process of decentralization in Romanian. The paper will try to emphasize the local autonomy of expenditures in Romania, taking into account an overview of this aspect and empirical evidences. In this regard, I will use the background offered by literature and legal framework and the official statistics data for analysis to identify the degree of local autonomy of expenditures in Romania. I estimate the analysis to confirm a normal local autonomy of expenditures, but also a need for improvement that require solutions and budgetary policy options as part undisputed positioning local government finance as an engine of development. I consider the paper can be considered a useful viewpoint in understanding local public expenditures in Romania and the degree of local autonomy, thus adding to the existing literature on financial decentralization field.
This article analyses aspects of public financial decentralization in Romania, enlightening major problems in public money allocation at countyâs administrative level. Actual public finance law and state budget law allow inefficiency and inequity in local public money spending. This happens, in our point of view, because of many rules, criteria and computations missing economic fundamentals and which skip stateâs principal objective: to insure citizensâ welfare by providing public goods and services. Our research finds which Romanian counties have difficulties to satisfy local public needs, by confronting financial decentralization level, economic development and public expenditures.
Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched. Available literature focuses heavily on policy and institutional design concerns framed by public finance, fiscal federalism, and public management principles. The literature tends to explain unsatisfactory outcomes largely as a result of some combination of flawed design and management of intergovernmental fiscal systems, insufficient capacity, and lack of political will. These factors are important, but there is room to broaden the analysis in at least two potentially valuable ways. First, much can be learned by more robustly examining how national and local political and bureaucratic forces shape the policy space, providing opportunities for and placing constraints on effective and sustainable reform. Second, the analysis would benefit from moving beyond design to considering how to implement reform more strategically.
Under the combined pressure of increased urbanization, fiscal adjustments and decentralization, central governments were pushed towards accepting the idea of local government accessing the private finance sources for their public infrastructure and service development investments. While the importance of borrowing increases for local developments, the main challenge many small municipalities have to face is the difficulty to access private financing sources. One obstacle is related to the creditworthiness of the municipal debtor or bond issuer. Sub-national governments can overcome the problem of creditworthiness through the use of credit enhancement mechanisms or techniques. The present paper is the first to discuss the situation of credit enhancements for Romanian municipal bond financing, its consequences and the path that might be followed for their further development. The absence of appropriate credit enhancements can be considered among the factors that contributed to the underdevelopment of the Romanian municipal bond market segment mainly between 2011 and 2014. In order to improve the municipal bond market profile, Romanian local governments should not ignore credit enhancements for any future bond issue and a combination of internal credit enhancements and bond pooling, as external credit enhancements seem to provide a feasible solution.
Brazil opted for decentralization in the provision of health services at the time of the 1988 Constitution´s promulgation. The municipalities became entirely responsible for primary healthcare provision, sharing financing responsibilities with the central government. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of health spending autonomy on infant mortality rates, using Brazilian local data from 2000 to 2007. As a measure of spending autonomy we used the share (%) of overall health expenditures financed by municipalitiesâ own resources. The larger the share of health expenditures which is not financed by the central government (grants), the greater the autonomy, because local governments can decide how and on what to spend these resources, and most of intergovernmental transfers to the health sector are allocated to predefined specific purposes. The fixed effects estimates, through the use of an instrumental variables approach, show that, on average, greater spending autonomy is not associated with lower infant mortality rates. However, given that local governments and populations are different in many aspects, it is reasonable to expect a heterogeneous response to decentralization. Galiani et al. (2008), for instance, assess the hypothesis that decentralization of high schools in Argentina may have increased the difference in educational outcomes. Could the same have happened to the quality of health in Brazilian municipalities? In well-managed municipalities and in which individuals participate actively and can support their preferences, fiscal autonomy ought to improve the delivery of public services. Using a measure of efficiency in the delivery of health services to split the municipalities in two groups, we got significant results for the more efficient municipalities, implying an increase in inequality. This measure corresponds to efficiency scores estimated using data envelopment analysis (DEA). We also test for heterogeneous impacts of the Family Health Program (PSF), the most important Brazilian basic health care policy, which main expansion occurred until 2007. It is a federal Program that each municipality runs independently. Again, we find evidence of a heterogeneous response, since PSF only reduces infant mortality rates in efficient municipalities. We then confirm Galianiâs (2008) hypothesis that decentralization may help only the best to do even better.