We develop a model of property taxation and characterize equilibria under three alternative taxation regimes often used in the public finance literature: decentralized taxation, centralized taxation, and ārent seekingā regimes. We show that decentralized taxation results in inefficiently high tax rates, whereas centralized taxation yields a common optimal tax rate, and tax rates in the rent-seeking regime can be either inefficiently high or low. We quantify the effects of switching from the observed tax system to the three regimes for Japan and Germany. The decentralized or rent-seeking regime best describes the Japanese tax system, whereas the centralized regime does so for Germany. We also quantify the welfare effects of regime changes.
Introduction. Modern pandemic threats, military-political tensions and conflicts, foreign economic risks, trade wars, financial imbalances encourage the EU countries to group and agglomerate financial potentials in the vertical and horizontal planes. There is a need to study the paradox of what role in this agglomeration is played by the mastery of using the principles of fiscal federalism, tested by a number of both unitary states and federal republics of the European continent. The purpose of the article is to monitor the main determinants of fiscal federalism in increasing the financial potential of the member states of the European Union. Method (methodology). In the course of the research, the following methods were used: dialectical, correlational, generalization, comparison, system analysis, observation, induction and deduction. The results. The article highlights the importance and place of fiscal federalism in the architecture of the financial policy of the European Union. Pragmatic aspects of financing public services in the member states of the European Union have been studied. This made it possible to identify active recipients in the field of attracting financial resources to ensure the priority needs of economic development. It is emphasized that the functional direction of general public spending in the European Union was aimed more at social protection and health care, and to a lesser extent at environmental protection and development of the housing and communal sphere. It has been established that most of the member states of the European Union combine the principles of centralization, federalism, and decentralization (in most cases) in their fiscal doctrine, but there are also clear systems of classical fiscal federalism (Germany, Switzerland). The European approach emphasizes that a secondary effect of globalization is excessive tax optimization, because the functioning of the integrated market makes tax evasion more attractive. An assessment of the influence of key parameters of fiscal federalism on the functioning of centralized and decentralized models of financial policy was carried out. This made it possible to identify the level of influence of the determinants of fiscal federalism on the relevant model through the prism of distinct factors. It is summarized that the use of determinants of fiscal federalism in the financial policy of the European Union is able to strengthen the budgetary and tax effects, which in the final (transformed) vector will lead to a strengthening of the economy and improvement of social standards both in the member states of the union and in individual municipal entities.
Under the fiscal decentralization system, China has implemented a central and provincial management system. Colleges and universities are divided into central and local colleges and universities. At present, local higher education is facing the dilemma of insufficient investment. The reasons are mainly reflected in three aspects: first, the inherent defects of China's fiscal decentralization system restrict the attention of local governments to the higher education needs of local residents; Second, the speed of local economic development can not keep up with the rapid development of the scale of local higher education, resulting in the lack of financial resources for local governments to invest in higher education;, The third is the game of local governments in the direction of financial investment under the fiscal decentralization system, which leads to the reluctance of local governments to invest funds in the field of higher education. We believe that in order to alleviate the plight of insufficient investment in local higher education, we should promote the decentralization reform of higher education investment system; The local government should establish a scientific view of political achievements, improve the understanding of the importance of higher education, and speed up the financial allocation to local colleges and universities; Mobilize non-public resources to invest in local higher education and broaden the financing channels of local colleges and universities.
Grassroots corruption is one of the difficult problems in grass-roots governance. At present, local government continues to decentralize power to grassroots departments, and a large number of public services and public goods are provided by the grass-roots governments, match with public finances. However, with the expansion of the scale of public finance expenditure at the grass-roots level, it should be especially vigilant about the ineffective expansion caused by the corruption at the grass-roots level. This paper aims to explore the logical relationship between grassroots corruption and fiscal expenditure through literature review, and then put forward some suggestions.
In the article the state, trends and features of financing environmental measures by local budgets in Ukraine in order to justify the possibility of increasing the effectiveness of local communities expenditures on environmental protection were investigated. To this end, an analysis of local government expenditures, including budget environmental programs, the structure and dynamics of environmental tax revenues to the general and special funds of state and local budgets from 2010 through 2020 were analyzed. The distribution of environmental expenditures between state and local budgets, the financing mechanism for environmental protection and the mechanism of providing the local environmental fund have been studied. According to the results of the analysis, it was shown that in the conditions of decentralization, the volume of local financing of environmental measures has increased. However, a significant part (over 50%) of environmental funds was directed to non-priority goals and activities. The share of expenditures of the Environmental Protection Fund for the implementation of definitely environmental measures was low. This does not contribute to solving current environmental problems and does not increase the capacity of local budgets in terms of environmental expenditures. Significant (over 60%) centralization of the environmental tax revenues in the state budget creates unfavorable conditions for the ecological sustainability of some regions. It was established that the main function of the environmental tax ā compensatory ā is not fully fulfilled. The environmental tax was mainly directed to the implementation of the general functions of the state and territorial communities. In order to increase the efficiency of local budget expenditures on environmental protection, it is necessary to develop criteria for assessing the impact of environmental measures, normative definition of mandatory environmental effects in budget programs and strengthen state financial control over the targeted use of local budget funds.
Jan 1, 2022Ā·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Tom Barbereau, Reilly Smethurst, Orestis Papageorgiou, Alexander Rieger Ā· 5 authors
Bitcoin and Ethereum are frequently promoted as decentralized, but developers and academics question their actual decentralization. This motivates further experiments with public permissionless blockchains to achieve decentralization along technical, economic, and political lines. The distribution of tokenized voting rights aims for political decentralization. Tokenized voting rights achieved notoriety within the nascent field of decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020. As an alternative to centralized crypto-asset exchanges and lending platforms (owned by companies like Coinbase and Celsius), DeFi developers typically create non-custodial projects that are not majority-owned or managed by legal entities. Holders of tokenized voting rights can instead govern DeFi projects. To scrutinize DeFiās distributed governance strategies, we conducted a multiple-case study of non-custodial, Ethereum-based DeFi projects: Uniswap, Maker, SushiSwap, Yearn Finance, and UMA. Our findings are novel and surprising: quantitative evaluations of DeFiās distributed governance strategies reveal a failure to achieve political decentralization.
Increased administrative discretion for human resource and financial management is commonly seen as a key component of efficient service delivery. However, the directive attitude of some central government officials in Tanzania undermines the administrative discretion of local councils to implement approved local plans and budgets. Using a case study of two local councils in Tanzania, this study investigated the influence of decentralization on administrative discretion and decision space. The findings show that local councils have little administrative discretion and decision space over human resources, financial management, and service delivery. The study calls for a comprehensive review of decentralization policies and local government legislation to address the allocation of powers and decision space of the institutional capacity of local councils to provide local services. Their roles and responsibilities should also be specified in the national constitution to safeguard them from the encroaching ādirective cultureā of central government officials.
The article considers the relationship between modern processes of budget decentralization and macro-financial policy of Ukraine. The focus on deepening decentralization processes in Ukraine remains unchanged. This emphasizes the use of the State Strategy for Regional Development for 2021-2027. The theoretical foundations of budget decentralization were introduced in the works of C. Tibet, W. Oates, E. Bracco, W. Tanzi, A. Aristovnik and other Western researchers. C. Oates defined the decentralization of fiscal powers as a benefit that could lead to a reduction in the size of the central government. This means reducing the tax burden by increasing competition from tax jurisdictions. For quantification at the level of an individual economy, it is possible to use the index of fiscal decentralization. This index consists of two sub-indices: the self-sufficiency index and the index of importance of subnational budgets. The OECD Fiscal Decentralization Database can be used as a source of information on fiscal decentralization. A retrospective analysis of economists has shown an increase in the index of fiscal decentralization and an improvement in the state of subnational entities in a favorable macroeconomic situation. On the contrary, the crisis worsens the conditions of subnational entities and is accompanied by a decrease in this index. With the beginning of the pandemic, there was a crisis situation regarding the macroeconomic support of further decentralization processes. Long-term social problems are deepening: demographic negatives, increasing external outflow of labor resources, shrinking the country's economy, progressive deindustrialization, high resource intensity of production, in particular, low energy efficiency, growing debt burden. The most destabilizing role is played by military events in the east of the country. High regional disproportion logically leads to a violation of the single economic space of Ukraine. The size of the budget deficit and public debt is increasing. The crisis has a significant impact on all macroeconomic processes, in particular, on the macro-financial stimulation of budget decentralization processes. The urgent task is to establish effective coordination of fiscal and monetary policy, as well as increase the capacity to attract loan financing. Extreme conditions force us to temporarily give up strategic intentions as such, which are not urgent. Public-private partnership can get another chance to become an effective mechanism of social interaction. Increasing competition between budgetary institutions and private institutions in these areas has the potential to increase the quantity and quality of public services.
Since the onset of the Great Recession, austerity has become more common at the national and local levels throughout the OECD. As states pass expenditure responsibilities down to the local level, this causes a shift toward mandatory spending at the local level which may undermine discretionary spending for social and physical infrastructure. We use Census of Government Finance data from 2012 for all county areas in the continental US to model the expenditure gap between current operations and capital investment, and show how this crowd out affects growth. Our structural equation models find fiscal decentralization has direct negative effects on local growth and indirect negative effects on growth by increasing the local current-capital expenditure gap. This local expenditure gap is larger where decentralization of spending responsibility is higher and state aid is lower, especially in places with greater need (poverty, older infrastructure, and rural areas). In contrast to the theoretical claims of fiscal efficiency, we find fiscal decentralization may be undermining local economic growth by increasing the gap between local current and capital expenditure. We argue that fiscal federalism (decentralization) is ābrokenā in the US because states have structural incentives to shift fiscal responsibility downward to local government, and local governments face increased social and economic need, especially since the Great Recession.
From a public finance point of view, achieving sustainable development hinges on two critical factors: the subnational implementation of public policies and the efficient allocation of resources across regions through vertical intergovernmental transfers. We introduce a framework that links these two mechanisms for analyzing the impact of reallocating federal transfers in the presence of regional heterogeneity from development indicators, budget sizes, expenditure returns, and long-term structural factors. Our study focuses on the case of Mexico and its 32 states. Using an agent-based computational model, we estimate the development gaps that will remain by the year 2030, and characterize their sensitivity to changes in the statesā budget sizes. Then, we estimate the optimal distribution of federal transfers to minimize these gaps. Crucially, these distributions depend on the specific development objectives set by the national government, and by various interdependencies between the heterogeneous qualities of the states. This work sheds new light on the complex problem of budgeting for the Sustainable Development Goals at the subnational level, and it is especially relevant for the study of fiscal decentralization from the expenditure point of view.
Christine R. Martell, Tima T. Moldogaziev, Salvador Espinosa
Abstract This book argues that capital markets can be an important source of financing for subnational governments across the globe as they face decentralization of governance systems and increased demand for infrastructure at the local level. The central argument is that information resolution at both the national-level and the city-level is critical for the success of subnational capital markets. Furthermore, the chapter argues that subnational governments can and must become competent actors with regards to both top-down (national to local governments) and outside-in (financial sector firms to local governments) transactions and pressures. This chapter presents city policymakers with options for capital market access when both system credit contractibility and underlying credit quality vary by offering a typology of alternatives for capital financing. The chapter recommends policies that establish contractibility and credit quality assessment mechanisms and concludes with recommendations for future research.
During the 1990s Morocco implemented a series of major institutional and economic reforms that made the country politically stable and helped it to withstand the destabilizing effects of the Arab Spring. Political reforms resulted in the adoption of a new constitution in 2011, was followed by initiatives to improve justice, public administration, the fight against corruption, and to strengthen governance, transparency, and ethics in public life. The country also embarked on a regionalization of public policies and decentralization of administration to ensure an integrated and durable regional development. This reform momentum was further emphasized by the King of Morocco when in his 2019 throne speech he stressed that “… the stake is thus to rebuild a strong and competitive economy, by encouraging the private initiative, while launching new productive investment plans and by creating new job opportunities…” During two last decades Morocco recorded relatively solid economic and social results due to significant public investments and structural reforms aiming to: (i) stabilize the macroeconomic framework by reducing domestic and external vulnerabilities, in particular through the gradual suppression of subsidies for energy products and some foodstuffs; (ii) improve the framework of management of public finance through the adoption of a new Organic Law of Finance in 2015; and (iii) support the diversification and the competitiveness of the national economy. Morocco also reinforced its sectorial policies through plans for sector development aiming at enhancing the economic growth potential and the creation of jobs, including in the manufacturing sectors with significant added value in sectors such as the automotive, aeronautics and pharmaceutical products. The Moroccan economy has demonstrated an appreciable resilience in the face of an international context characterized by a succession of crises. The rate of growth of real GDP improved on average annually from 3.1% during the 1990s to nearly 4.2% on average annually between 2007 and 2018, sustained by the tertiary sector’s dynamism which posted an increase in its value added of 4.2%, contributing of 2.1 points in the GDP (Figure 1). The secondary sector also showed a similar tendency with a 3.3% increase in added value, carrying with it 0.9 percentage points contribution in economic growth, while the primary sector added value grew by 4.4% for a contribution to the growth of the GDP of 0.6 point (DEPF, 2019).
We build an endogenous growth model with consumer-generated data as a new key factor for knowledge accumulation. Consumers balance between providing data for profit and potential privacy infringement. Intermediate good producers use data to innovate and contribute to the final good production, which fuels economic growth. Data are dynamically nonrival with flexible ownership while their production is endogenous and policy-dependent. Although a decentralized economy can grow at the same rate (but are at different levels) as the social optimum on the Balanced Growth Path, the R&D sector underemploys labor and overuses dataāan inefficiency mitigated by subsidizing innovators instead of direct data regulation. As a data economy emerges and matures, consumersā data provision endogenously declines after a transitional acceleration, allaying long-run privacy concerns but portending initial growth traps that call for interventions. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance.
The fundamental problem confronting most local authorities, especially those managing cities in developing countries, is the widening gap between the availability of financial resources and municipal spending needs. One of the main reasons for this increasing fiscal gap is the rapid growth of urban populations, which creates an ever-increasing demand for public services, new public infrastructure, and its maintenance. Most cities in developing countries depend mostly on central government transfers, with lesser revenues derived from property taxation and service charges. The main aim of this study is to review the scholarly published documents regarding the responsible governing system of the local government in the developing economy and to observe the challenges to them to manage fiscal imbalances. Looking at the practice of fiscal federalism and economic decentralization, there is no uniformity in the global experience. Developed countries are at the forefront of this agenda while developing countries have different experiences. It is important to find the right path with the appropriate solution to the problem seen from the international experiment and move forward accordingly. It is important not only to make laws but also to achieve prosperous prosperity through their proper use and for that it is important to understand that the implementation of the law should be done in the right spirit.
Presents evidence from seven country case studiesāSudan, Uganda, Indonesia, Colombia, Brazil, Bulgaria, and Chinaāon how intergovernmental fiscal transfers have strengthened education systems and improved education outcomes, exploring how these countries have used transfers to (1) provide adequate basic education funding; (2) narrow education inequalities; (3) increase efficiency; and (4) incentivize better performance from various actors in the education sector, drawing mostly on the evidence presented in the case studies, but also including examples from other countries, mostly high-income countries, where necessary with some principles for the design and implementation of effective transfers for education. The case study countries differ in their stages of economic development and the number and size of their subnational jurisdictions. Gross national income (GNI) per capita varies from US$590 in Sudan to over US$10,410 in China. Although all of the case study countries have decentralized, considerable variability exists in the size of the basic education systems their sub-national governments manage.
Outlines key principles of fiscal decentralization, as drawn from the academic literature, including: (1) the rationale for devolving service provision and financing responsibilities to subnational governments; (2) guidelines for assigning particular expenditures and revenues across levels of government; and (3) a framework for designing and allocating intergovernmental transfers. The decentralization of responsibility for the provision and financing of services from central governments to subnational governments remains a pervasive phenomenon in developing and transition countries. In theory, decentralization results in a better match between subnational public service delivery and diverse citizen preferences. The most commonly stated objectives for intergovernmental transfers include adequacy, equity, efficiency, and performance. In general, individual types of grants require matching with objectives. The impact of intergovernmental fiscal transfers on subnational education spending depends, in theory, on the type of transfer. Conditional transfers have a larger effect on education spending than general transfers, because subnational governments must spend targeted conditional transfers in the education sector.
Purpose This paper aims to study the impact of municipalitiesā own resources on their investmentsā expenditure. Design/methodology/approach Panel data analysis. A sample of 34 municipalities in Benin. Econometrics tests for the panel data models ā estimation of the fixed-effect and random-effect models. Hausman test to identify the best model to explain the impact of the explanatory variables on local investmentsā expenditures. Heteroskedasticity, normality and autocorrelation tests. Findings The results establish a positive and significant impact of own resources, state transfers and demographic variables on local investmentsā expenses. Research limitations/implications As an implication, the results show the importance of local resourcesā mobilization for the municipalitiesā investment capacity building. They also show that the central government transfers continue to play a major place in local investmentsā finance, even in a decentralization context. Limitation: Available data do not allow to well evaluate the impact of the electoral variable on municipalitiesā investmentsā expenditure. This situation does not allow to well analyze the public choice considerations in local authoritiesā behaviors. Practical implications Local mobilization of financial resources must be encouraged to raise municipalitiesā investmentsā capacities. Strategies must be developed to reinforce local capacities in local resources mobilization. Social implications The results show the importance of local resources in local investments. They show the importance of citizensā participation in their well-being construction, through local resource mobilization (ex: local fiscality). Originality/value Many authors assert in the literature that financial autonomy has a real impact on local development. However, empirically, it was not demonstrated. This paper contributes to correct this lack.
The subject of the study is the processes of budget decentralization in the management of public finances, as well as mathematical methods and models for implementing the concept of hard budget restrictions in order to create conditions for the self-development of administrative-territorial units. The aim of the study is to develop adaptive economic and mathematical models for implementing the strategy of hard budget constraints implemented in the process of inter-budget regulation. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that currently the subject of acute discussion in the scientific community is the self-development of administrative-territorial entities and increasing their financial independence. In this regard, the focus of economic research is focused on the problems of budgetary decentralization as an engine of economic development, as well as the related topics of the use of mathematical tools for modeling decision support in this area. The created models are subject to the requirements of learnability, adaptability to changing conditions of environmental influences, and the ability to operate not only with quantitative, but also with qualitatively defined characteristics. The problem of mathematical modeling is solved by applying an interdisciplinary synthesis of the theories of stochastic automata operating in random environments and fuzzy logic. The proposed synthesis of theoretical and methodological devices is the novelty of the research. As a result , an economic and mathematical model of a fuzzy automaton is constructed for determining and quantifying the values of the norms for the distribution of tax revenues between budgets of different levels of the budget system. A fuzzy automaton interacts with a simulation model that reproduces budget flows and quantifies the decisions made by the automaton model. The practical significance of the research results lies in the program implementation of the developed models and their inclusion in the public finance management circuit. In the future , it is planned to create a mathematical model of the collective behavior of fuzzy automata models, the interaction of which solves the problem of coordinating the interests of budgets of different levels of the hierarchy in the distribution of tax revenues.