Blockchain Papers

Mitsuyoshi Kawase

No abstract is available for this record.

William N. Evans, Sheila E. Murray, Robert M. Schwab

No abstract is available for this record.

Tao Zhang, Heng‐Fu Zou

In this paper, we present an analytical model for examining the growth impact of intergovernmental and intersectoral allocation of public expenditure. The model helps us quantify the role of fiscal decentralization in regional economic growth and identify whether central and local allocation of public spending among various sectors are growth-enhancing. Applying our analytical framework to a panel data set of 16 major states in India, we have found that, in many cases of our regressions, fiscal decentralization is positively, and even statistically significantly, associated with state economic growth. The state allocation of public spending in various sectors is broadly consistent with "growth-maximizing", whereas increases in the central allocation of its budget among development projects, nondevelopment projects, and social and community services by cutting the center¡¯s spending on all other functions can promote regional growth. Furthermore, the distortionary effect of the state tax in India is dominated by the productive effect of tax-financed public spending, whereas the reverse holds for the central tax.

Jeni Klugman

This paper develops a framework by which the impact of decentralization of government on child welfare can be assessed. Consistent with the child welfare perspective, it is suggested that equity should be given greatest weight, in terms of both equality of opportunity and progress in reducing disparities in access. Allocative efficiency, a notion that has figured prominently in the economics literature about the merits of decentralization, is shown to have limited value once we accept the existence of externalities and public goods in the provision of basic services. The review of available evidence for Asian and transition countries suggests that there is a significant risk that equity can be adversely affected by the decentralization of education and the associated financing arrangements.

Cecilia Ugaz, Ugaz, Cecilia

This paper is the fruit of an attempt to distinguish the elements, present in a fiscal decentralization process, that are likely to contribute to efficiency enhancement in the provision of social services in developing countries. From the methodological point of view, the paper makes an effort, whenever possible, to isolate the economic from the political in the arguments for and against fiscal decentralization. These two sets of arguments, economic and political, both equally important, are often intermingled in the literature. The distinction between them may improve our understanding of the advantages and limitations of the selection of a 'decentralized' provision of social services. Although nearly all the aspects of the fiscal decentralization process may be of some relevance in terms of the issue of equitable social service provision, the paper tries to stress the need to provide adequate incentives to local bureaucracies through the design of transfers and through community participation.

Josef T. Yap

Via regression analysis, this study is able to establish factors that impinge on per capita social sector expenditures. In addition, 32 out of the 62 provincial governments have allocated less on social sectors than what is needed to maintain their 1991 expenditure level in real terms. Inconsistencies regarding budget allocation of provincial governments on the social sectors and the objective indicators are detected.

J Suárez-Pandiello

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the financial behavioural analysis of Spanish municipalities since the start of the ambitious process of political and economic decentralization linked to the restoration of democracy at the end of the 1970s. Specifically, the author presents financial figures, reviews the characteristics of the local finance system and the evolution of that system through what has been a series of unfinished reforms, and concludes by suggesting some possible corrections to the imperfections, or loose ends, detected.

Donald R. Winkler, Taryn A. Rounds

No abstract is available for this record.

Albert Park, Scott Rozelle, Christine Wong, Changqing Ren

Central-local budgetary arrangements have undergone numerous changes since the 1960s as the Chinese government in its quest for modernization has sought to balance the needs of central control and local autonomy. During the reform period, the falling tax share of GNP and a commitment to greater decentralization of the planning system led to major changes in the public finance system that have devolved expenditure responsibilities and financial authority to local governments. Fiscal decentralization has been credited with hardening budget constraints for local publicly controlled enterprises and government agencies. New budgetary relations have instilled fiscal discipline, allowing local governments to disburse more expenditures only if they generated more revenues. These reforms have helped unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of local bureaucrats, fuelling the rapid growth of rural industry.

Gabriel E. Aghón, Leonardo Letelier

This paper is intended to analyze, in a comparative perspective, the financing mechanisms of urban local governments in two groups of countries. The first group refers to a sample of OECD countries. They are rather decentralized, and have institutional features which date back many years from now. The scope of responsibilities faced by these countries. The second group is constituted by a number of Latin American countries. They are, in general, less decentralized and have the characteristic of not having a well established institutional structure. This has experienced various changes over the recent years, one of them being a process of transferring responsibilities to local tiers of governments, a tendency which in general, has not been accompanied by an increasing capacity to get resources neither from the central government nor from the local financial market.

Paul Smoke, Blane D. Lewis

No abstract is available for this record.

Louis‐André Gérard‐Varet, Jacques Thisse

The special issue of Annales d'Economie et Statistique presented here comes out of an international conference which was held in Marseilles (GREQAM) in June 1994 in connection with a programme of Commissariat General au Plan and with the support of ADRES. Sixty scholars, specialists in economic geography and local public finance, have participated to the conference which was part of the programme of Commissariat General au Plan on Issues and mechanisms in decentralized public action. The objective was to discuss recent work in economics related to the geography of trade and power.

Juliet Musso, John M. Quigley

No abstract is available for this record.

Nobuki Mochida

No abstract is available for this record.

Robin Boadway, Isao Horiba, Raghbendra Jha, Boadway, Robin · 6 authors

It has realized since Pigou (1947) that if public goods are financed by distortionary taxation, the marginal social cost of providing the public good will exceed the actual resource cost by the marginal deadweight cost of taxation.

Priscilla Wohlstetter, Richard J. Wenning, Kerri L. Briggs

By the end of 1994, 11 states had passed legislation authorizing charter schools. Following the argument that charter schools need to be autonomous, self-governing organizations to enhance their potential for high performance, this study explores legislative conditions that promote charter school autonomy. The study applies a conceptual framework of autonomy to assess variations among state charter school policies. 7he results suggest that state policies offer different levels of autonomy and thus charter schools will vary in their ability to innovate and in their potential for high performance. Differences in autonomy across charter school laws appear to be related to state political cultures and to the state's history of decentralization reform.

Alec Ian Gershberg

While decentralization is on the forefront of the reform agenda of many developing countries, few studies have performed empirical analysis to provide a holistic picture of the important fiscal, efficiency, and equity issues. Specifically, decentralization nearly always involves fiscal and administrative decisions by both national and sub‐national governments, as well as intricate intergovernmental relations. Here, two empirical models are presented for the Mexican primary and secondary education sector. The first analyzes the efficiency‐equity trade‐off implicit the Mexican Federal Government's educational fiscal transfers to states. Unlike most similar analyses, this model analyzes the distribution of outcomes not simply expenditures. The second model analyzes the relative productivity of separate expenditures by the Federal and state governments before Mexico's recent educational decentralization legislation. The findings show that before the decentralization, the Federal Government exhibited some concern for equity, but that in doing so also treated states unequally according to criteria that have little to do with either efficiency or equity. In addition, the results show that the Federal Government may indeed have been the more efficient provider of primary and secondary education, raising concern for the fiscal and administrative relationship set up by the decentralization legislation: the Federal Government will continue to pay, while the states have gained relative autonomy over expenditures.

Bai Yan

The Caiden and Wildavsky work of 1974 postulates a model of poverty-uncertainty: the governments of poor countries face disappearing and decremental budgets in financing public programs because of a lack of economic growth or poverty. The core argument is that economic development, as a critical variable, determines increments in budgeting practices. In other words, budgeting is incremental, and incremental budgeting results from the growth of GNP. This model has since become a set of principles with identifiable attributes to explain the budgetary processes in poor nations.
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\nThis study is about application of that model in China's budgeting. China has a unitary budget system. The central government used to draw most of its revenues from provinces and its budget includes those of 31 provinces. Provinces thus play a dual role of collecting revenues from within and remitting them to the center in the name of revenue sharing. In 1978 China decided to open to the world, reform its economy, and decentralize budget to provinces. But the original intent of decentralization was to give incentives so that provinces accumulate more resources for further central extraction. The decentralization, however, has led to fiscal decline not anticipated by the reformers.

Richard M. Bird, Jennie I. Litvack, M. Govinda Rao

A successful poverty alleviation strategy has four distinct elements: 1) identifying who the poor are, where they are located, and what they do; 2) analyzing why they are poor; 3) developing policies to improve their standards of living; and 4) supplementing income-improving policies with direct"safety net"policies to increase the poor's short-term consumption etitlements. The precise mixture of"capacity-improving"investments and"safety net"policies appropriate for any country will depend on the country's income level, the extent and nature of its poverty problem, and many other factors. The strategy chosen must be implemented effectively. Spending and revenue decisions need to be more decentralized to ensure that the poverty alleviation policies adopted reflect the preferences, needs, and fiscal abilities of different regions of the country. The nature of that decentralization depends on the country. Pro-poor services throughout Viet Nam are underfunded. This problem is particularly acute in the poorer areas. Improvements in the system of intergovernmental finances could help ensure that each level of government, even in the poorer provinces, is adequately funded - and provided with sufficient expenditure and revenue raising autonomy - to support local investments and their operation and maintenance. Since poor provinces are less able to mobilize additional local revenues to support services, well-designed intergovernmental transfers are particularly important. Provinces must play a greater role both in raising revenues and in allocating expenditures, with incentives built in to ensure that they do so responsibly and efficiently. Local governments must - if they are tobe held accountable for their actions - have some responsibility for determining local tax rates. This will allow them to vary rates to collect more revenues to finance higher levels of public services if they so choose, and at the same time allow the central government to design its transfers in such a way as to ensure that local fiscal efforts are not discouraged by the receipt of such transfers. Richer provinces will tend to collect greater revenues. When transfers are needed to finance local spending in poorer areas, they should provide incentives for local revenue mobilization and allow for some degree of equalization. Services deemed of national importance (for example, a minimum level of education, health care, and social relief) can be promoted by designing specific-purpose transfers. These services must be identified and varying matching requirements established for different provinces depending on such factors as their own revenue base and the cost of providing services in that province.

Randall Crane

Abstract Renewed interest by the Indonesian government in decentralization and cost‐recovery practices has led to both real and illusory reforms, though the distinction between the two is often not clear. This is particularly true with respect to infrastructure planning and finance. Recently, the allocation criteria for capital grants to local governments have been substantially revised, nearly every year, to reflect long lasting concerns regarding differences in interregional development needs and resources. In addition, the level of funding for local government investment has risen dramatically to support increased local responsibility in planning. Most development spending does not pass through local budgets, however. In either case, the project planning process has remained firmly under the direction of the central government's technical ministries. Infrastructure investment thus tends to be segmented, not only by sector, but also by funding source. The rate at which these two factors balance off in current practice does not indicate a strong commitment to effective decentralization. The article suggests that greater regional government participation in the national planning process would be beneficial. To deal with the fragmented nature of sectoral planning is more problematic, as a more integrated approach would in the long term require either a new layer of bureaucracy or a substantial reorganization of the technical ministries. In the shorter term, a gradual shift toward general purpose grants would also generate regional development plans more consistent with the goals of decentralization while maintaining substantial central control and oversight.

Joseph L. Scarpaci, Ignacio Irarrázaval

A major issue in Latin. America is the decentralization of public finances and the autonomy of local government. This article begins with a brief review of the ongoing decentralization debate. We then discuss key features of local government finance and autonomy among unitary and federal governments in Latin America. Against that backdrop, we focus on the Chilean case, which has been a widely celebrated success story in the economic development literature. We argue that despite major gains by municipal governments over the past two decades, financial decision making powers still rest with the national government. This creates financial complacency among local governments. To remedy this, we conclude with six proposals for promoting effective decentralization.

Richard M. Bird, Caroline Freund, Christine Wallich

No abstract is available for this record.

David Wallich Sewell

Economic decentralization emerged as an issue in Albania following the first election of a noncommunist government in Albania in 1992. It is one of many challenges in creating a fiscal system that supports reform. Decentralization has begun with the central government's transferring spending responsibilities primarily for some local infrastructure services to local governments. But, given Albania's small size, it is unclear whether"people"services such as education and health care need to be delegated to local governments. Although the destruction of local health and education facilities accompanying the demise of the old regime argues for giving communities a greater sense of ownership of these facilities, they should not be handed down without mechanisms to ensure uniform service standards. Draft laws focus on the transfer of assets (schools and clinics) to local jurisdictions but are vague about responsibilities for recurrent spending. And because local spending responsibilities are expanding, local governments need increased revenues to finance them. Providing an adequate social safety net is vital in Albania - the poorest of the economies in transition - and the government has taken steps to ensure that parts of it are locally administered, though centrally funded. The key to a well-designed intergovernmental financial system is to clearly define spending responsibilities so that a revenue system can be designed to accommodate them. Such a system would combine revenue-sharing, own-source revenues, and intergovernmental transfers. Tax-sharing of central government revenues based on district of origin cannot be the only means of local finance in Albania, as most revenues are collected in only a few districts. To meet financial needs, local governments need some authority over significant own-source revenues (such as user charges and property and vehicle taxes). Privatization revenues can also help local governments but only in the short run, as they are nonrecurrent. Matching grants with spillover effects may be appropriate. And for low-income regions incapable of meeting their spending needs alone, a transparent, equalizing transfer system should be developed. Albania's draft laws allow for this possibility, having established constituent and independent budgets for the local level.

Richard M. Bird, Christine Wallich

Extensive decentralization, both political and fiscal, is taking place in many of the countries newly emerging from behind the socialist veil. Decentralization represents both a reaction from below to the previously tight political control from the center and an attempt from above to further the privatization of the economy and to relieve the strained fiscal situation of the central government. Although there are of course many variations in this process from country to country, some important common elements arise from the similar institutional starting point in all countries and the common transitional problems most of them are facing. The on-going reforms of subnational finance in the transitional economies are more important than seems generally to be recognized. The design of a well-functioning intergovernmental fiscal system is key to many of the major reform goals of the transition economies—macroeconomic stability, privatization, and the social safety net.