The formation of the three tiers of government represents a novel experiment in Nepal’s federal journey since the adoption of the new constitution in 2015. State power in the former unitary system, both rights and responsibilities, has been divided across federal, provincial and local tiers of government, with a mix of exclusive and concurrent powers for each. In matters within their jurisdiction, subnational governments can formulate laws on financial rights, set their own budgets, make decisions, devise plans and policies, implement those plans, levy taxes, and collect revenues. In the roughly three years since devolution went into effect, a few problems and uncertainties have cropped up, particularly in the exercise of power. Subnational governments complain that the center has not been very cooperative when it comes to the formulation of laws, allocation of resources, transfer of the institutional set-up, etc. However, there have been some achievements in the implementation of federalism. Institutional structures have formed at the subnational government levels, they have begun staffing, and their fiscal situations are gradually strengthening. Improvements have been made in almost all areas, including social, human development, economic, infrastructure and administrative sectors. A sense of positive competition has been created between different local and provincial governments. However, a continuing point of tension in Nepal’s federal devolution is shape of the fiscal architecture supporting the new rights and responsibilities of subnational governments. The constitution provides many functional responsibilities to provinces but only limited revenue rights. This structure conflicts with the “finance follows function” principle of effective decentralization, suggesting that initiatives are needed to review the fiscal space of the provincial level. The purpose of this paper is to analyze existing institutional structures and details of subnational government finance (“fiscal architecture”) in Nepal, primarily at the provincial level, and identify recommendations for improvement.
Marko M. Vujić, Olja Munitlak Ivanović, Darko Nadić
Decentralization of certain sectoral policies in recent decades is one of the preconditions for the efficient functioning of modern states. A blatant example of the necessity of decentralized implementation of a sectoral policy is environmental policy. Environmental policy is based on four basic principles, one of them is subsidiarity. Why the effects of decentralized implementation of environmental policy in Serbia are unsatisfactory, and what factors influenced the process, is the main research question posed in this paper. Through multi-level analyzes, it will be pointed out that the inefficiency of the implementation of the state environmental policy is caused by inadequate decentralization in the first place. This will be supported by concrete examples such as inaccurate and inadequate sources and methods of financing, insufficient inventiveness of local self-government units, exclusion of citizens from the process of creating and making decisions in the field of environmental protection, lack of jobs for efficient environmental policy implementation, and imprecise legal frameworks. In proportion to the scope of the issue, the ways of financing in this area will be a special topic of work.
The article discusses the topical issue of the present day: decentralization and its budget efficiency (on the example of the Pavlivska amalgamated hromada in the Volyn region). A significant feature of decentralization today is voluntary association with other territories in order to improve living conditions and development of the area. Decentralization facilitates the improvement of investment climate, forms an efficient environment for attracting investments and financing the activities of Ukrainian regions. That is why decentralization allows amalgamated hromadas to reveal their internal potentials. The result of local self-government depends on the appropriate use of financial resources, independent resolution of regional issues. The publication uses indicators of budget self-sufficiency, budget effectiveness, budget transparency to analyze the budget efficiency of the territorial community, based on an assessment of the level of implementation of the distribution and redistribution of the local budget of the amalgamated hromada. Budget self-sufficiency demonstrates how the territorial community can develop itself, budget effectiveness is responsible for the expenditure part and the result of these costs, and budget transparency — for insightfulness and openness of information for citizens. The introduction of decentralization aims to improve the system of management of territorial communities and the system of administrative and territorial structure of the country, with the improvement of the state of residence and development of citizens regardless of their place of residence. With the help of decentralization, the investment climate of the country is improving and an efficient environment is being formed to attract foreign and domestic investors. Financing of territories allows opening up new opportunities for the evolvement of amalgamated hromadas.
In the age of economic globalization, the need for independence in important economic decisions individually and collectively is evident. Decentralization and fiscal decentralization are trends for political and economic reform in recent decades around the world. Albania began the process of transition from a centralized economy to a free economy in the early 1990s. Numerous reforms followed this process in almost all sectors. This process is accompanied by transforming existing economic mechanisms and infrastructure to better function the free-markets model, but above all, with the need to develop and create new legal, institutional, economic, and social instruments and spaces to increase the allocation and efficiency of public and private resources. The latest reform in terms of decentralization is the Territorial Administrative reform of 2014. We try to answer the research question through this study: What has been the impact of decentralization reforms on the local government's public services' performance? The research methodology used is a descriptive analysis of data obtained from the Ministry of Finance and Economic and local municipalities on the reforms' impact. Data analysis shows that some improvements and progress has been made in advancing decentralization reform, but there are still many challenges ahead, such as the lack of a clear legal and regulatory framework. Adding to that concern is local governments' financial autonomy, which remains a challenge for the future.
Abstract Setting limits on government action is critical to economic development. Some forms of government organization, such as market‐preserving federalism, seem effective to protect property rights in the long term with good results for economic efficiency. Spain endowed its regions with “Statutes of Autonomy” in the 1980s thus moving from a centralized to a decentralized form of government. It renewed and expanded some of the statutes in the 2000s. This article investigates whether these two waves of regionalization, which had their own characteristics in each region, had led to positive effects on economic performance. Using a novel autonomous region/country‐matched balanced sample for the period 1950–2016, we apply the synthetic control method and compare the economic growth trajectories of Spanish regions with their synthetic control groups not affected by the regionalization process. We show that the first wave of “Statutes of Autonomy” had a positive but temporary economic growth impact. By contrast, the second wave of regionalization of the 2000s is associated with a negative growth impact.
The germ of the fund that structurally changed the financing of education
Primary was born from an idea by Luiz Villela. In the early 1990s,
The Ary Oswaldo Commission studied the tax reform using different approaches.
Together we formulate a proposal, called salary-education,
to redesign the state and municipal quotas of the social contribution, which
it was collected from the payroll and distributed among governments according to the origin of the collection
Highly skilled human capital is usually also highly mobile. Concerns regarding interregional migration revolve around suboptimal public financing of higher education rooted in free-riding behaviour if budget responsibilities are decentralized. This investigation sets out to answer whether cross-state mobility of students in general and individual taste variation in the preference for ‘home’ and ‘university’ states in particular justify concerns about the free-riding behaviour of state governments. We analyse graduates’ location choices when leaving university using a mixed logit model and subsequently relate the revealed taste variation to individual characteristics. The results suggest some attachment to ‘home’ states that justify concerns about potential free-riding. However, substantial taste variation exists and is partly associated with the quality of human capital. State governments free-riding on the investment of others therefore may face a quality trade-off.
Introduction. In the context of reforming the system of local self-government and territorial organization of power, the use of world best practices in the context of decentralization and implementation of best foreign practices in shaping the finances of territorial communities and their associations is of paramount importance. Accordingly, a number of important theoretical postulates of domestic financial science need to be reconsidered through the prism of improving existing and developing the latest conceptual approaches to the functioning of the finances of united territorial communities (OTG) using international advances in this area. local development.Purpose. Given the limited theoretical and practical work of domestic scholars on the finances of the united territorial communities, the purpose of the article is to use the best world practices to improve the efficiency of OTG finances.Methods. The methodological basis of the study are general scientific and economic- statistical methods: analysis, synthesis, statistical method - to study the international experience of OTG finance reform; inductions, deductions - to determine the directions of development of OTG finances in Ukraine; abstract-logical, economic-mathematical - for estimating revenues and expenditures of local budgets of OECD countries. Results. The world experience of reforming the finances of territorial communities is considered. In the context of application of the best international practices the directions of development of finance of OTG in Ukraine under modern conditions of carrying out financial decentralization are offered. Estimates of revenues and expenditures of local budgets of OECD countries were assessed, which allowed to determine priorities in revenue generation, expenditure optimization, distribution of powers and functions, as well as the use of new sources to increase the revenue base of local communities and their associations in Ukraine. Discussion. The prospects for further research is to develop a model for optimizing the financing of OTG development in order to ensure the implementation of its own powers and functions.
While the founders of cryptocurrencies may not conceptualize their efforts as such, the infrastructural choices they make in designing their systems mimic those routinely made by lawmakers in the design of fiscal policy. The totality of their decision-making in this regard constitutes essential elements of “taxation” written into the governance structure of the cryptocurrency system — its tax cryptographia . This article examines how cryptocurrency founders determine what common goods are necessary to make their systems viable and then design a way to fund them. The object of comparing certain cryptographic design elements to taxation is to examine how investors, speculators, enthusiasts, and skeptics should assess the decisions that founders make, and why it might matter if the participants in cryptocurrency systems recognize the fiscal infrastructure as a reproduction of state-like functions that serve to allocate the cost and benefits of participating in the collective activity despite the core motivation of cryptocurrency to bypass centralized and hierarchical political institutions.
Income inequality is one of the problems that must be addressed immediately because it can have an impact on economic inefficiency and weaken the stability of social solidarity. One of the policies that can reduce income inequality is fiscal decentralization implementation. Specifically, this study aimed to analyze the effect of fiscal decentralization on income inequality in regencies and cities in West Java. The model used in this research was a fixed effect panel data regression. Fiscal decentralization was measured by adding the total regional revenue (Pendapatan Asli Daerah/PAD) to revenue sharing (Dana Bagi Hasil /DBH) and divided by the total regency and city expenditure. Income inequality was measured by using the Gini Ratio. The results indicated that fiscal decentralization could reduce income inequality in regencies and cities in West Java. The reason was that, through decentralization, local government could manage their finance and affect the welfare level. In addition, local government could also implement certain policies to increase the potential of each region.
Abstract Our analysis of US state‐level data on an annual frequency, from 1976 to 2008, sheds new light on a plausible causal link between infrastructure investments, namely public spending on highways, and income inequality. This causal relationship is drawn out using the number of seats in the US House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations (HRCA) as an instrument to identify quasi‐random variations in state‐level spending on highways. An exogenous pattern which emerges when a state gains an additional member to the HRCA is that it is allocated with new federal grants. This increase in federal transfers for infrastructure financing results in slashing of expenditures on highways and a crowding‐out effect of federal funding for state investments on highways. Spending cuts on highways produced by a new HRCA member being attained by a state can unwittingly cause income inequality to rise over a short 2‐year time horizon. Similar challenges with decentralized development to finance infrastructure via federal transfers to state and sub‐national governments may be encountered by other industrially advanced, emerging and low‐income developing economies. US data over the mentioned period reveal a strong positive correlation with state spending on highways and wages paid for construction jobs. Suggestive evidence indicates that the construction sector also plays an important role in the transmission channel from a rise in state spending on highways to lowering income inequality, albeit during specific intervals, as opposed to on a long‐term basis.
Given the complex and severe external economic environment and the increasing downward pressure on the domestic economy, fiscal policy, as a structural policy, is expected to stabilize growth. However, affected by the implementation of tax and fee reduction policies, the cooling of land finance and the strict control of hidden debts, the pressure on local public finances has become increasingly prominent, and the space for proactive fiscal policies is limited. In order to make subsequent policies more steadily advancing in response to the downward pressure on the economy, on the one hand, we must ensure fiscal sustainability to provide guarantees for the stability and sustainability of economic operation; on the other hand, we must avoid preventing and controlling risks in a “one-size-fits-all” way to leave a cushion for expansionary policies. Therefore, under the current economic and fiscal situation, it is of great practical significance to scientifically understand local fiscal situation and examine the impact of key institutional factors on local fiscal sustainability based on the Chinese-style fiscal and political systems.Fiscal competition and soft budget constraints are the two core issues contained in the Chinese-style decentralization system, which have a profound impact on the fiscal behaviors of local governments. This paper integrates the two into a unified analytical framework, analyzes their impacts on local fiscal sustainability by distinguishing the modes of fiscal competition and the forms of soft budget constraints, and investigates the interaction effects between them. The results show that both tax competition and expenditure competition have a significant negative impact on fiscal sustainability. For different forms of soft budget constraints, the effect of transfer payments on local fiscal sustainability is uncertain, while land revenues and municipal investment bonds have a significant negative effect. Research on interaction effects shows that the interaction between transfer payments and fiscal competition is conducive to fiscal sustainability, but the interactions between land finance, municipal investment bonds and fiscal competition are not conducive to fiscal sustainability. Further research indicates that there is regional heterogeneity in the above effects.This paper proposes the following policy recommendations: Firstly, it is very necessary to establish a fiscal system that the revenue resources and expenditure responsibilities commensurate, reform the political promotion mechanism and establish a diversified performance evaluation system. Secondly, in the governance of excessive fiscal competition and soft budget constraints, the interaction between them should be considered. More specifically, central government may encourage standardized and orderly fiscal competition to reduce local government's reliance on off-budget revenue, and increase transfer payments to ease excessive fiscal competition. Thirdly, to ensure sufficient fiscal space and sustainable fiscal policies, differentiated designs should be made according to the economic development level and fiscal status of different regions, as well as the interactive mechanism between the modes of fiscal competition and the forms of soft budget constraints.
Today, the problem of cities local finances and their governance, is at the heart of major national debates and reforms, as well as major concerns in all countries where decentralization continues and aims to strengthen the autonomy and competences of local administrations. The mobilization of local fiscal potential is a fundamental condition for promoting sustainable urban development. Despite the efforts made, local Moroccan finance, like most developing countries, does not escape an absolute reality: The scarcity of the resource. The weakness of local resources in Morocco is more related to the real low level of local tax deduction than to the economic poverty of local authorities. Many sectors of the economy have very little or no tax, while property taxes does not contribute enough to local economic activity. This article uses the case of Morocco to analyze the challenges and failures of local finances in general, and of local taxation in particular. We also discuss the tools to promote the financing of cities to promote sustainable urban development in Morocco.
Cities are the engines of economic growth, drivers of structural and spatial transformation processes, and the generators of wealth. However, city finances in India are in an abysmal state, and its urban local bodies are progressively losing fiscal autonomy. The problem is deeply rooted in the hierarchy set up defined as per the fiscal federalism framework adopted by the nation. The objective of the paper is to critically review India's federalism, discuss its prevailing expenditure‐revenue assignment framework, and analyse the key issues in fiscal decentralization. This paper overviews the entire public finance system in India, brings out the anomalies in expenditure and revenue assignments between the higher levels of government and the urban local bodies, and addresses the areas of concerns at the urban local government level. It also suggests policy measures to put Indian urban local bodies on a strong footing in the public finance map of India.
How decentralized government structure influences public service delivery has been a major focus of debate in the public finance literature. In this paper, we empirically examine the effect of fiscal decentralization on natural disaster damages across the U.S. states. We construct a unique measure of decentralization using state and local government expenditures on natural resources, which include investment in flood control and mitigation measures, among others. Using state‐level panel data from 1982 to 2011, we find that states that are more decentralized in natural resource expenditures have experienced more economic losses from floods and storms. This effect is only pronounced in states that are at higher risks of flooding. Our findings suggest that fiscal decentralization may lead to inefficient protection against natural disasters and provide implications for the assignment of disaster management responsibilities across different levels of government in the U.S. federal system.
Local governments have been created as agents of local development in which the people in the local areas are given greater opportunities to influence policies and programs that directly affect their well-being and thereby reducing their poverty levels. But the implementation of the policies and programmes is bedeviled with many problems. Key among them is the issue of financing the local development projects in order to reduce rural poverty. The government of Ghana attempted to reduce this problem when it introduced a development fund in1994 known as the – District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) to encourage local governance and deepen Government’s commitment to decentralization in general and fiscal devolution in particular. The study therefore, seeks to assess the impact of District Assembly Common Fund on Local Government Development in the Adaklu District Assembly in the Volta Region of Ghana. The study mainly adopted qualitative methods of research to obtain information on the experiences of the poor people in the Adaklu communities selected as study areas. Interview guides were used to obtain information from the people in the communities, staff of the Assembly and some heads of the decentralized departments. A major finding of the study is that the assembly did not involve the rural people in the poverty reduction programmes in the district.
In this note I show that quadratic funding achieves decentralized social efficiency in the extent there are enough (donor) matching funds to cover the quadratic funding objective. If individual backers internalize that matching funds will not be sufficient to reach the quadratic level, allocation will be biased towards the capitalist allocation, the more so, the less matching funds are available. This result emerges even when individual contributors are not required to finance the deficit (i.e., the difference between total contributions and available matching funds). I also show properties of the level of required matching fund, in order to better understand under which conditions social efficiency will most likely be compromised.
This paper contributes to the empirical literature on the linkages between decentralized government spending, public finances, and economic growth at the local level. The impact of local government spending on output growth is estimated using a panel of Italian Labor Market Areas - a group of municipalities adjacent to each other, geographically and statistically comparable, characterized by common commuting ows of the working population - during the 2002-2012 period. The attention is focused both on current and capital expenditures as well as on several spending categories. To handle endogeneity problems between public spending and economic development, a system generalized method of moments has been used. The findings indicate a fairly robust negative relationship between local current government expenditure and economic growth. Investment in capital budget turns out to be not statistically significant when the public spending composition is taken into account. Municipalities located in central-southern regions show, instead, negative growth e ect of capital spending, underlining the importance of measuring the efficiency of public spending rather than just being concerned with the absolute level of output. Only few of the expenditure categories (Justice, Tourism and Culture) exhibit positive effects on growth, while Administration & Management and Roads & Transportation have negative growth effect in southern regions.
Nuwun Priyono, Siti Arifah, Eva Wulandari, Panji Kusuma Prasetyanto
The purpose of this study is to prove to what extent the influence that fiscal decentralization, local financial performance, local government expenditure, Locally Generated Recurring Revenues or Pendapatan Asli Daerah (PAD), Profit-Sharing Fund or Dana Bagi Hasil (DBH), General Allocation Fund or Dana Alokasi Umum (DAU), and Special Allocation Fund or Dana Alokasi Khusus (DAK) have on the level of society welfare. The objects of this research are Regencies and Municipalities in Java Island. The data used in this study are the secondary. The data on balance sheet and realization report of the regional revenues and expenditure budget (APBD) are from the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia. The data on the level of society welfare that is proxyed by the value of HDI is obtained from Bappenas and BPS of Central Java. This research uses time series data from 2012- 2014 periods. The research method used is the research of causality with linear regression model. The result of the significance test shows that only one DAK variable can partially affect the HDI variable. Meanwhile those variables other than DAK partially or individually do not influence the HDI variable. The result of regression analysis shows that simultaneously such variables as Fiscal Decentralization, Regional Finance Performance, Local Government Expenditure, PAD, DAU, DAK and DBH have an influence on HDI in Regencies / Municipalities in Java Island.
Ravi Shekhar Vishal, Sheetal Singh, Kala Seetharam Sridhar
This chapter summarizes the research on urban finances in India and China. It first discusses the background urbanization and economic growth in the two countries, followed by a description of the decentralized nature of government at the local level in India and China, following which this chapter debates and discusses reforms in municipal finance (both revenues and expenditures) in the two countries. The chapter ends by concluding and drawing lessons from India from a practitioner’s perspective.
Qurat ul Ain, Tahir Yousaf, Yan Jie, Yasmeen Akhtar
This paper provides empirical evidence on the association between post-2001 devolution reform policy, government size, and specifc components of government expenditures based on a sample of panel data of provincial units in Pakistan from 1990 to 2015. The results demonstrate that devolution is associated with a larger government size, which provides empirical support for the common-pool hypothesis, implying that the decentralization that matters for the size of the general government depends on how sub-national governments finance their expenditures. Moreover, the fndings suggest a signifcant increase in the magnitude of Health and education facilities at the local level following the devolution reforms.
The current global development agendas provide relatively little guidance on how the incredible challenge of sustainable urban development in Africa can and should be financed. This paper makes the case for understanding this development challenge at the nexus of urban governance and city infrastructure. Tracing African urban development trends over the post-colonial period, the paper makes three arguments. First, African cities experience fractured fiscal authority. Decentralization reforms have resulted in contested and complex city governance arrangements. Second, large scale infrastructure investments have been the focus of donors and investors. This has resulted in fragmented networks and systems. Finally, these two processes together have created fertile ground for the emergence of hybrid systems of service delivery in cities. This has implications for both how urban services are governed and their material arrangements. This reality, and the underlying processes which contributed to its production, are under-accounted for within global development discourses. In conclusion, it is crucial that new models of infrastructure finance are developed to respond to the fractured fiscal authority, fragmented infrastructure networks, and hybrid service delivery patterns which characterise African cities.