A recent trend in decentralization in \n several large and diverse countries is the creation of local \n jurisdictions below the regional level -- municipalities, \n towns, and villages -- whose spending is almost exclusively \n financed by grants from both regional and national \n governments. This paper argues that such grants-financed \n decentralization enables politicians to target benefits to \n pivotal voters and organized interest groups in exchange for \n political support. Decentralization, in this model, is \n subject to political capture, facilitating vote-buying, \n patronage, or pork-barrel projects, at the expense of \n effective provision of broad public goods. There is \n anecdotal evidence on local politics in several large \n countries that is consistent with this theory. The paper \n explores its implications for international development \n programs in support of decentralization.
From 1979 to 1983, a new intermediate level of government was created in Spain. This article focuses on the financial aspects of political decentralization in Spain. How much power to tax do the new regional parliaments and executives enjoy? What other sources of income do they dispose of? Which rules have been settled for regulating their tax and non-tax sources of income? Has fiscal decentralization affected fiscal discipline? Are these governments now financially autonomous? These are the questions addressed. The article shows that, with the exception of the Basque Country and Navarre, regional governments were financed mainly through intergovernmental grants during the 1980s and 1990s. However, as a result of several recent reforms, their power to tax as well as their financial autonomy has increased substantially since the mid-1990s, mainly through their participation by law in the revenues of several central taxes (known as ceded taxes) upon which they also enjoy significant regulatory rights. As the ceded taxes mechanism is not a simple revenue-sharing formula in Spain, the article concludes that the Spanish model departs from both the more uniform and top-down German model and the more heterogeneous and competitive one characterizing the taxing rights of the States in US federalism.
Fiscal decentralization is one component of decentralization that gives authority to local governments to collect revenue through taxes and responsibility over spending decisions. Even though fiscal decentralization has given revenue raising and spending decision powers to lower levels of government, the implementation process has often been a daunting task for many local authorities in the developing world. In the case of Ethiopia, decentralization has been implemented since 1991. However, revenue raising and expenditure management are not efficiently and effectively exercised, especially in lower level government units of Ethiopia. Insufficient revenue collection and reprehensible expenditure management leads to financial incapability such that public infrastructure and services could not be financed amply. Dangila municipality faces the problem of financial capacity to deliver infrastructure and services to its citizens. While a number of studies have documented the financial incapacities of Ethiopian municipalities, they have been very shy to articulate the discrepancies and deficiencies that link financing to service delivery. It is interesting to know what the driving factors are in this case. Therefore, the main focus of this paper is to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of revenue collection and expenditure management of Dangila Municipality. To obtain edifying data the paper used a positivist survey study. Municipality financial documentation and questionnaires were the main sources of secondary and primary data respectively. Parametric descriptive statistical methods were applied in the analysis of data to arrive at measures of efficiency and effectiveness in revenue collection and expenditure management of the municipality. The study revealed that the municipality is not efficient and effective in its revenue collection and expenditure management. The main explanation for such inefficiency comprise; derisory assessment of taxable sources, poor organizational structure, inadequate accounting system, absence of clear operational guidelines, poor planning and data base management, lack of awareness by taxpayers and lack of skilled manpower. To resolve such challenges, we recommend the following actionable measures; widening the revenue base of local sources of revenue, improving planning and implementing capacity, establishing adequate data base systems, continuous awareness creation for taxpayers, establishing appropriate guidelines and methods of revenue collection, revision of the tariff structure regularly, installing accounting system that produces timely and reliable information, encouraging community participation in planning and resource allocation and municipal restructuring that take into account needs and welfare of employees. Classification-JEL: R53, R42
The aim of the present work consists in the methodological study of the instruments for the equalization of the local public incomes in the administrative-territorial structures for the elaboration of some measures for the effectiveness increase of the local public expenditures modality and for the improvement of the public services quality. The research theme is important for the local economy and financial literature on local public finance. It is known that the tax base of the territories is quite uneven and providing quality public services is impossible based on their own sources. Financial equalization is a group of financial actions made in order to overcome economic and fiscal disparities between territories. The applicative value of work consists in the research of the public services financing modality for the improvement of their quality, scientific argumentation of the necessity of the incomes equalization at the territories. As for findings, I consider that the support for less developed local public administration from the financial point of view requires fiscal decentralization and involves financial equalization procedures or other similar measures aimed at eliminating the effect of unequal distribution for potential funding sources. The purpose of financial equalization is the additional funding of less developed territories in order to reduce regional disparities, and in this lies the value of the hereby study.
The realization of basic rights need the government' protection,therefore public fund is needed too.However there are financial difficulties and financial crisis of many governments,which constitute the restrictive conditions for the protection of basic rights.Regional economy makes unbalanced development in China,and the overtaking-model strategy of economic development leads to the Matthew effect in public finance,which makes the problem of protection of basic rights equably become important subject of the protection of the basic rights,especially for the right of equality.The answering methods of China is to set up the mechanisms of controlling fiscal power,fiscal decentralization,and fiscal balance,so that the equalization in basic public service shall be advanced in nationwide scope at appropriate time.
This diploma thesis analyzes the impact of the fiscal federalism policy on a municipality economy in the Czech Republic. The theoretical basics consist of a historical analysis of municipalities' legal status and mode of financing. That is followed by defining of a fiscal federalism model and a fiscal decentralization model, and by taxation and income analyses. Final part focuses on the income and expenditure analysis of municipalities in the period 2002-2010 and an overall evaluation.
We develop a dynamic politico-economic model of public investment where decisions can be made at several levels of government: federal, state, or county. The model predicts that in the absence of internal mobility, the higher level of government would fund all investments that present positive externalities not fully internalized at lower levels. But when there are important internal migrations unrelated to fiscal policy, investments that are embodied - and therefore are useful to citizens if they move to other jurisdictions, like education - are more likely to be funded at the local level than investments that are physically sunk, as infrastructure. Such pattern of migrations and financing is consistent with U.S. data.
This study attempts to understand the post-reform decentralization of infrastructure investment and transfer of responsibility in China. Changes in the institutional configuration of infrastructure investment are a reflection of the ongoing process of state restructuring. Since the economic reform, infrastructure investment has transformed from being an exclusive central state-controlled operation to a central-local bargaining regime. The functions formerly exclusive to the central government are now scaling down to local governments, while scaling out to market actors. This has fuelled the formation of new partnerships in infrastructure development. However, the scaling down and scaling out processes have not led to the total retreat of the central state, nor the relaxation of state control. Using the Wuhan-Guangzhou High Speed Rail as an example, this paper investigates the inter-scalar and relational webs of multi-actor and multi-level governance in financing a major infrastructure project. Our main argument is that the state investment regime has now shifted from an exclusive, national monopoly to an intrinsic partnership, between different tiers of governments, and between the state and the market in order to meet the demands of development and to overcome the hurdles of state budget constraints.
Sonia Esteban Laleona, Pablo de Frutos Madrazo, María José Prieto Jano
Traditionally, the academic debates about the benefits that the existence of multilevel government structures provide have been directly related to the gains in efficiency that derive from the processes of decentralization of the Public Sector. However, as of the last decades, the Public Finance has broadened its analysis towards other questions, one of them being if the fiscal decentralization influences positively in the economic growth of a country. The objective of this document is to provide a “reading guide” for this new line of investigation on the influence of fiscal decentralization on economic growth.
Juan de Dios Jiménez Aguilera, Roberto Montero Granados, Pedro Enrique Barrilao González, Elena Villar Rubio
La reforma del acuerdo de financiacion de las CCAA espanolas de 2009, en vigor desde enero de 2010, profundiza en la corresponsabilidad fiscal, ampliando la capacidad normativa de algunos impuestos y la participacion en las cuotas territorializadas del Impuesto sobre la Renta de las Personas Fisicas (IRPF), el Impuesto sobre el Valor anadido (IVA) y algunos Impuestos Especiales (IIEE). Segun el mencionado acuerdo, el porcentaje descentralizado de la recaudacion por IVA y por impuestos especiales se distribuye entre las Comunidades Autonomas (CCAA) en funcion de indices de consumo territorializado mientras que la recaudacion por IRPF se distribuye en funcion de la cuota integra declarada por los sujetos pasivos residentes en cada Comunidad Autonoma (CA). Este articulo pretende mostrar evidencia sobre la traslacion del ingreso tributario entre regiones en los tres tributos debida, en parte, a que el ingreso se realiza en la CA del domicilio fiscal del sujeto pasivo independientemente de donde se produzca el hecho imponible. Las conclusiones justifican la distribucion del acuerdo por IVA e IIEE en funcion de criterios basados en el consumo territorializado, pero no asi la distribucion del tramo autonomico por IRPF que se distribuye en funcion del ingreso de los residentes. Since January, 2010, there's a new public financing agreement for the Spanish regions. This is based on the fiscal responsibility, expanding the regulatory capacity of some taxes and increasing the territorialized participation in the Income Tax (PIT), values added tax (VAT) and some special taxes (IISS). According to that agreement, the revenues decentralized of VAT and excise duties are distributed among the Autonomous Communities (CCAA) in terms of consumption rates, while the personal income tax revenue is distributed according to the amount declared by the persons living in each Autonomous Community (CA). This article treat on transfer of tax revenue between regions in the three taxes, due primarily that the tax pay is made in the CA of taxpayer's residence regardless of where the taxable event occurs. The findings justify the income distribution for IISS and VAT based on territorialized consumption, but not the regional distribution of personal income tax which is distributed according to revenue of residents.
We study overborrowing and financial crises in an equilibrium model of business cycles and asset prices with collateral constraints. Private agents in a decentralized competitive equilibrium do not internalize the effects of their individual borrowing plans on the market price of assets at which collateral is valued and on the wage costs relevant for working capital financing. Compared with a constrained social planner who internalizes these effects, they undervalue the benefits of an increase in net worth when the constraint binds and hence they borrow "too much" ex ante. Quantitatively, average debt and leverage ratios are only slightly larger in the competitive equilibrium, but the incidence and magnitude of financial crises is much larger. Excess asset returns, Sharpe ratios and the market price of risk are also much larger. A state-contingent tax on debt of about 1 percent on average supports the planner's allocations as a competitive equilibrium and increases social welfare.
In this paper we study the optimal monetary and fiscal policies of a general equilibrium model of unemployment and money with search frictions both in labor and goods markets\nas in Berentsen, Menzio and Wright (2010). We abstract from revenue-raising motives to focus on the welfare-enhancing properties of optimal policies. We show that some of the\ninefficiencies in the Berentsen, Menzio and Wright (2010) framework can be restored with appropriate fiscal policies. In particular, when lump sum monetary transfers are possible,\na production subsidy financed by money printing can increase output in the decentralized market and a vacancy subsidy financed by a dividend tax even when the Hosios’ rule does\nnot hold.
Government spending on health has grown as a percent of GDP over the last 40 years in industrialized countries. Widespread decentralization of healthcare systems has often accompanied this increase in spending. In this paper, we explore the effect of soft budget constraints on subnational health spending in a sample of OECD countries. We find countries where subnational governments rely primarily on central government financing and enjoy large borrowing autonomy have higher healthcare spending than those with more restrictions on subnational government borrowing.
This essay reviews theoretical arguments concerning the issue of decentralized redistribution. We make a representative examination of what are regarded as the merits and demerits of fiscal decentralization from a redistributive perspective, emphasizing the concepts of social solidarity. We proceed to take a closer look at the decentralization theorem, and argue that the celebrated theorem is not an appropriate framework for the issue of redistribution. We then review other merits as well, and argue that those merits largely concern the cost-efficiency of public service delivery and could be in principle exploited without compromising the principle of horizontal equity, through two forms of administrative decentralization, delegation and de-concentration. However, the local incentive problem still remains. The design of transfers and personnel control mechanism will be a crucial factor to attain the cost-efficiency of local administration.
Local governments can make an important contribution to public well-being through the execution of local government policies and the delivery of public services that are important to the local citizens. For this reason, through the local budgets are financed the public goods that are selected to be more important. But if the own revenues of the local budgets are low, the local authorities are dependent on the central ones, fact that affect the allocation of resources by the destinations. Because of the unlimited needs, the local governments search for alternative sources of financing, like bank loans, loans from the capital market, leasing, using some collaboration formulas with the private sector, like public-private partnerships and other financing forms. In a analysis on Romanian case, we shows that a greater level of decentralization give to local governments greater possibilities to cover local needs by attracting new resources, also from alternative ways.
Fiscal federalism has been an important topic among public finance theorists in the last four decades. There is a series of arguments that decentralization of governments enhances growth by improving allocation efficiency. However, the empirical studies have shown mixed results for industrialized and developing countries and some of them have demonstrated that there might be a threshold level of economic development below which decentralization is not effective. Developing and transition countries have developed a variety of forms of fiscal decentralization as a possible strategy to achieve effective and efficient governmental structures. A generalized principle of decentralization due to the country specific circumstances does not exist. Therefore, decentralization has taken place in different forms in various countries at different times, and even exactly the same extent of decentralization may have had different impacts under different conditions. The purpose of this study is to investigate the current state of the fiscal decentralization in Mongolia and to develop policy recommendations for the efficient and effective intergovernmental fiscal relations system for Mongolia. Within this perspective the analysis concentrates on the scope and structure of the public sector, the expenditure and revenue assignment as well as on the design of the intergovernmental transfer and sub-national borrowing. The study is based on data for twenty-one provinces and the capital city of Mongolia for the period from 2000 to 2009. As a former socialist country Mongolia has had a highly centralized governmental sector. The result of the analysis below revealed that the Mongolia has introduced a number of decentralization measures, which followed a top down approach and were slowly implemented without any integrated decentralization strategy in the last decade. As a result Mongolia became de-concentrated state with fiscal centralization. The revenue assignment is lacking a very important element, for instance significant revenue autonomy given to sub-national governments, which is vital for the efficient service delivery at the local level. According to the current assignments of the expenditure and revenue responsibilities most of the provinces are unable to provide a certain national standard of public goods supply. Hence, intergovernmental transfers from the central jurisdiction to the sub-national jurisdictions play an important role for the equalization of the vertical and horizontal imbalances in Mongolia. The critical problem associated with intergovernmental transfers is that there is not a stable, predictable and transparent system of transfer allocation. The amount of transfers to sub-national governments is determined largely by political decisions on ad hoc basis and disregards local differences in needs and fiscal capacity. Thus a fiscal equalization system based on the fiscal needs of the provinces should be implemented. The equalization transfers will at least partly offset the regional disparities in revenues and enable the sub-national governments to provide a national minimum standard of local public goods.
Tax increment financing (TIF) is the most widely used local government program for financing economic development in the United States, but the proliferation of TIF is puzzling. TIF was originally created to support urban renewal programs and was narrowly focused on addressing urban blight, yet now it is used in areas that are plainly unblighted. TIF brings in no outside money and provides no new revenue-raising authority. There is little clear evidence that TIF has done much to help the municipalities that use it, and it is also a source of intergovernmental tension and a site of conflict over the scope of public aid to the private sector. Yet, the expansion of TIF makes sense in light of the basic structure of American local government law. Studying TIF can illuminate central features of our local government system. TIF succeeds -- in the sense of its widespread adoption and use -- because it, like local government more generally, is highly decentralized; reflects and reinforces the fiscalization of development policy; plays off the fragmentation of local governments and the resulting interlocal struggle for investment; and fits well with the entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of contemporary local economic development policy. A better understanding of TIF contributes to a better understanding of the political economy of American local government.
The essay provides support to the hypothesis that financing of provincial public spending through national transferences leads to overspending. We rest on persuasive economic and politicoinstitutional arguments. Fiscal illusion and the Leviathan model help to explain the overspending. And cartelization of tax collection helps to explain why governors are so reluctant to decentralize this task. We conclude that a fiscal organization closer to that of a confederation would be desirable. Two ways of organizing fiscal relations between the Nation and the provinces are considered. One way consists of paying for national spending by means of periodic provincial transferences; control of public spending by tax-payers would be the greatest possible in this scenario, though leaving national financing in provincial hands could be a risky affair. Another way consists of allowing the Nation some taxing power and incorporating constitutional restrictions as regards the kinds of public goods the national government is permitted to provide.
In OLG economies with life-cycle saving and exogenous growth, competitive equilibria in general
fail to achieve optimality because individuals accumulate amounts of physical capital that differ from the one that maximizes welfare along a balanced growth path (the Golden Rule). With human capital, a second potential source of departure from optimality arises, related to education decisions. We propose to recover the Golden Rule of physical and also human capital accumu-
lation. We characterize the optimal policy to decentralize the Golden Rule balanced growth path
when there are no constraints for individuals to finance their education investments, and show that
it involves education taxes. Also, when the government subsidizes the repayment of education
loans, optimal pensions are positive
*Abhay Pethe is Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Mumbai. B. M. Misra is Adviser and Rakhe.P.B. is Research Officer, Department of Economic Analysis and Policy, Reserve Bank of India. The views expressed in this study are the authors ’ own and do not necessarily reflect views of the organizations to
This report is about the fiscal performance of rural local governments in the state of West Bengal. Specifically, our goal is to develop a comprehensive fiscal information system for all rural local governments, and to use these data to valuate the intergovernmental finance structure in the state. The work is of significant policy importance, given the need to implement programs to respond to the constitutional amendments mandating fiscal decentralization, and to support central and state government initiatives to use the Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) as an important part of its poverty alleviation strategy. A more immediate need in West Bengal (and other states as well) is to support the work of the State Finance Commissions to better integrate rural local governments into the intergovernmental fiscal framework. To date, there has not been a comprehensive review of rural local government finance in West Bengal.