The global financial safety net (GFSN) has become larger and more decentralized, creating a need for greater coordination. The expanded GFSN has created multiple sources of official financing for countries in need of support to address balance of payments shocks. Enhanced coordination among these layers would facilitate a more efficient use of global resources and provide better incentives for implementing sound policies. A new non-financing Policy Coordination Instrument (PCI) would address gaps in the GFSN and the Fund’s toolkit. The new Policy Coordination Instrument is designed for countries that are seeking to unlock financing from multiple sources and/or to demonstrate a commitment to a reform agenda. It would enable a closer policy dialogue between the Fund and countries, more regular monitoring of economic developments and policies, as well as Board endorsement of those policies. It would be available for all member countries. The key design features draw on Fund financing arrangements and the Policy Support Instrument (PSI), with some important differences. These include no qualification criteria, a review-based approach for monitoring of conditionality, and a more flexible review schedule. The PCI is part of a broader set of Fund policy proposals to improve coordination with RFAs, enhance liquidity provision for members, and ensure the cohesion of the Fund’s toolkit. The IMFC and the G20 called for further work to strengthen the GFSN and to improve cooperation between the Fund and regional financing arrangements (RFAs). In response, the Fund has produced a diagnostic of the GFSN and the Fund’s toolkit and identified important gaps. Introduction of the PCI, when considered together with the other proposals, will help to move towards a GFSN with improved coverage, more reliable support, and better coordination between the various layers.
David Bartolini, Agnese Sacchi, Simone Salotti, Raffaella Santolini
The virtues of fiscal decentralization are usually assessed against the provision of local public goods; little is said about its impact on public finances. There is a growing concern that public finances may be negatively affected when spending and taxing powers are delegated to subnational tiers of government, especially under adverse financial conditions. Our work proves that these concerns are unfounded. The empirical investigation on 19 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries over the period 1980–2010 shows that the budget balances of central and local governments do not get worse with fiscal decentralization. Moreover, during banking crises expenditure decentralization seems to be beneficial, as the central government can easily shift resources from intergovernmental grants to financing public policies necessary to tackle the crisis. In turn, more subnational tax autonomy would improve the budget of all tiers of government, suggesting that more ‘effective’ tax decentralization increases fiscal discipline also in times of financial distress. (JEL codes: H60, H70 and G01).
Fiscal decentralization is seen as part of a reform agenda in developing countries to strengthen regional and local governments. It is believed that it improves the efficiency of public service delivery through preference matching and allocation efficiency. In light of this, this study was conducted to assess the practices of Woreda level fiscal decentralization in Addis Ababa City Government. In doing this study, explanatory mixed method research design was followed. Subjects of the study were government officials working in selected Woredas and sub-cities of Addis Ababa city. In the study, multi-stage sampling technique was used to select representative respondents. To this effect, one hundred ninety-two participants were selected using multi-stage sampling technique. Besides, sub-city and Woreda Finance and Economic Development Bureaus officials were purposely selected to conduct key informant interviews. The data gathering instruments were questionnaire, key informant interviews, and document analysis. The study followed statistical tests to test the research hypotheses. It applied Kruskal Wallis test of significance. The study involved strict respect for informed consent, voluntary participation, and confidentiality. The findings of the statistics tests indicates that respondents' responses concerning autonomy of Woredas in planning and budgeting, revenue generation and retention, expenditure assignments were significantly different. This implies that there is absence of uniformity in the practices of these aspects of fiscal decentralization in the city. On the contrary, the respondents' response concerning the functionalities of institutional and legal frameworks, inter-governmental fiscal relations, challenges, and constraints of fiscal decentralization, were not significantly different. In general, the practice of fiscal decentralization in the city was limited as existing institutional and legal frameworks were in short of clarity and uniformity. Respondents stated that Woreda administrations had weak revenue base, and need clear planning and budgeting, and expenditure assignment autonomy. Based on the findings of the study, the research hence recommended that existing institutional and legal frameworks should be structured in the way that it enables Woreda administrations to generate and utilize sufficient revenues, plan and budget their own activities, have clear autonomy of expenditure assignments. Inter-governmental fiscal relations should also be planned to reduce the vertical imbalances observed at Woreda Administration level.
Smriti Ranjan Bhattacharyya -, A. Dey, Gautam Bandyopadhyay
INTRODUCTION:Governments at all levels have to play a major role in developing urban infrastructure which strengthens the base of an economy. Indian Constitutionhas provided for a three tiers federal structure (Union, State and Local) specifying the powers and responsibilities for all the tires of the governments. Therefore, it is the desired intention of the Constitution that all the tiers of the Governments work in a co -ordinated manner well within limits of the Constitution for urban infrastructure development. Third tier of Governments are generally termed as local self-governments and it has two wings, one which operates in the rural areas and the other in the urban areas. Constitutional status has been provided to these local governments through the 73th and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts, 1992. Local self-governmentoperating in urban areas are commonly known as Urban Local Self Governments.Prior to the Amendment Act, the plan for local infrastructure development were used to be drawn by the upper tier governmentswhere local requirement would not be considered. Therefore, the amendment is a direction to the state governments for transfer of power and responsibilities to the local governments with respect to preparation of plans for economic development and social justice, and also for the implementation of development schemes as may be required to enable the local governments to function as institutions of self-government. Unfortunately the issue of empowerment of the local selfgovernments has been left at the discretion of the state governments and as a result legislation primarily aims to make urban local bodies accountable to their stategovernment rather than to the citizens (The World Bank, 2007).Urban Local Self Governments (hereinafter referred to as ULSG) are of three types: (i) Nagar Panchayats for areas in transition from a rural area tourban area; (ii) Municipal Councils for smaller urban areas; (iii) Municipal Corporations for larger urban areas.India is also in the stage of rapid urbanization like other countries in the World and the constitution has provided different and concurrent list of works for different levels of governments. The role of ULGs, after becoming statutorily responsible for providing basic infrastructural facilities and maintenance of the same in the urban areas, has become more and more important.ULSGs find it difficult to balance between the limited financial resources and the unlimited needs for public services. (Tesu, 2011).FINANCIAL ANALYSIS OF ULSGs:ULSGs are statutorily responsible to carry out decentralized functions effectively and this requires presence of two important elements: adequate level of revenue either raised locally or transferred from the central government and the authority to make decisions about expenditures (Meddzi and Gondo, 2010). Finance of ULSGs consists of two major sources: own source and external source. Own source of receipts basically includes tax and non-tax receipts within the assigned power whereas external source constitutes a major portion of grant and assignments from upper tiers including contribution from others, loan from bank or financial institution and fund raised through issue of bonds.Psycharis and Iliopoulou(2016) have commented that local municipalities in Greece have a limited extent of tax or other forms of fiscal autonomy and therefore still rely heavily on fiscally centralized revenue sources. This situation also prevails in the ULSGs in India. Several literaturesshow that the dependency is due to the constitutional imbalance between the enormous functions and legitimate source of finances. ULSGs in India have lowest tax base (property tax, advertisement tax etc.)and upper tiers enjoy higher tax bases. Therefore,funds collected by the upper tiers are devolved to the lower levels of governments but not at the desired level. In order to resolve the imbalance, the amendment act has stated for constitution of state finance commission in every state which in addition to finance commission constituted by the central government. …
Sustainable and inclusive growth in emerging Asian economies requires continued high levels of public sector investment in areas such as infrastructure, education, health, and social services. These responsibilities, especially with regard to infrastructure investment, need to be devolved increasingly to the regional government level. However, growth of sources of revenue and financing for local governments has not necessarily kept pace, forcing them, in some cases, to increase borrowing or cut spending below needed levels. This chapter reviews alternative models of the relationship between central and local governments, and provides an overview and assessment of different financing mechanisms for local governments, including tax revenues, central government transfers, bank loans, and bond issuance, with a focus on the context of emerging Asian economies. The chapter also reviews financing mechanisms for local governments and mechanisms for maintaining fiscal stability and sustainability at both the central and local government levels. Based upon the evidence on the decentralization process in Asia, it proposes some policy implications for improving central–local government relations and fiscal sustainability.
Fiscal decentralization has been established in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but crises emerge at the local government level due to remaining problems of the fiscal administration system of tax allocation and the impact of replacing the business tax with a value added tax. The PRC taxation system requires readjustment and local governments have begun to focus on innovative financing models. The main path to stable and sustainable government finances is to maintain the general public budget and the government fund budget. The present chapter shows that use of innovative fundraising and financing channels will lead to the upgrading of local government infrastructure and public services. Suggestions for enhancing local government fiscal stability and sustainability include: reducing the fiscal burden at the local level by standardizing and legalizing outlay establishing a modern taxation system; establishing a standardized and predictable transfer payment system by introducing block transfer payments and prioritized transfer payments as a basis for a stable growth mechanism for general transfer payments; promoting public–private partnership legislation to encourage participation of social capital and maximize the multiplier effect of public expenditure; and improving the mid-term budget and debt-annexed budget and establishing a government planning mechanism for investment and debt financing of major infrastructure construction projects.
In the terms of decentralization and local autonomy, increase of financial capacity, is the result of more use of fiscal and financial instruments, as well as increasing the effectiveness work of the local government. They are facing a series of complex issues related to the functions they have to carry and their financial capacities against these needs. Local Government Units in Albania have few funds to fill the needs for financing great projects mainly infrastructure, so in this paper we aim to analyze the financing instruments of local government. Borrowing from financial institutions and second level banks is the main financial instrument for Local Government to financing their great investment for the community. This is a new financing instrument for LGUs in Albania that is considered as a strong financial lever to enable the financing of their budgets and great projects capital investment. Another instrument are guidelines constructed in similar models and experiences of countries in political and economic tradition with that of Albania, the issue of bonds of LG / municipal bonds which are regulated by laws. Programs of international agencies to support lending to the local government is also another a significant financing instrument for LGUs in Albania to fulfilled their needs. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2016.v5n3s1p387
Objectives: This study is aimed at analyzing various facets of Fiscal Federalism and its impact on the growth of states in India. Methods/Analysis: The Study proposes a model to test the impact of autonomy and hard budget constraints, two important features of decentralization, on the economies of the states. The model has been analyzed using the Fixed Effects Least Squares method for panel data using EViews. Findings: The results point out quite a few aspects of the impact of fiscal federalism on Indian states. The paper concludes by giving possible reasons for the negative relation between autonomy with growth and the positive relation between central grants with growth. The fact that the OwnTax ratio is negatively related to the GSDP growth rate shows that the level of autonomy of a state is negatively related to the growth of the state. The study also revealed a high dependence of the states on the grants and tax sharing mechanisms for growth. It was found that the central intervention in the states’ economy was positively related to their growth, which points to soft budget constraints on the states which depend highly on the central government to finance their spending. The overall level of decentralization was also found to be quite poor, though the relationship is not very economically significant. Applications/Improvement: The Study highlights that trade-off between the autonomy and budget constraint aspects of fiscal federalism needs to be a major concern and work area for policy makers in India.Keywords: Economic Growth, Fiscal Federalism, Tax
Political economy theory expects politicians to use budget deficits to engineer an election-timed boom, known as the political business cycle. We challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the financial constraints faced by governments into an electoral framework. We argue theoretically that the extent of ownership dispersion among creditors has important effects for governments’ policy autonomy. Specifically, we contend that when highly indebted governments become more reliant on international bond markets—as opposed to traditional bank lending—politicians alter the way they respond to domestic constituents. In an econometric test of 16 Latin American countries, from 1961 to 2011, we show that financial decentralization breeds austerity. More specifically, we find that politicians exhibit more fiscal discipline when they fund a greater share of their spending through decentralized bond markets. Furthermore, we find this disciplining effect to be particularly strong during election periods.
“Promotion tournament model” is used to explain the Chinese economic miracle. The key of the promotion tournament model is competition for economic growth which brings economic growth together with some societal problems. Competition for economic growth influences local governments’ behavior and is one of the reasons for the rapid rising of local debts. The article proposes a new competition model—competition for inhabitants’ satisfaction. It is a better choice under the system of political centralization with fiscal decentralization in China. It gives inhabitants the right to supervise the government officials while the central government has the power of appointment. Competition for inhabitants’ satisfaction changes the local governments’ investment and finance behaviors, which is meaningful to improve China’s local government debt governance.
Strong local autonomy or decentralization process became a goal for local governments, but one of the main question in literature remains as how strong must be the local autonomy of expenditures at the local governments’ level. Given the great diversity of situations and legal framework over the period after 1990, I consider that Romania must have a stable legal framework regarding local public finances and stable strategy of local development designed to implement a sustainable process of decentralization in Romanian. The paper will try to emphasize the local autonomy of expenditures in Romania, taking into account an overview of this aspect and empirical evidences. In this regard, I will use the background offered by literature and legal framework and the official statistics data for analysis to identify the degree of local autonomy of expenditures in Romania. I estimate the analysis to confirm a normal local autonomy of expenditures, but also a need for improvement that require solutions and budgetary policy options as part undisputed positioning local government finance as an engine of development. I consider the paper can be considered a useful viewpoint in understanding local public expenditures in Romania and the degree of local autonomy, thus adding to the existing literature on financial decentralization field.
This dissertation comprises three empirical essays in political economy. The first essay analyzes the implementation of a French social program by subnational governments following a decentralization reform. Using program implementation data, it shows that local political environments strongly influence implementation decisions after decentralization, and that decentralization results in an overall tightening of benefits. The second essay reports the results of a conjoint field experiment involving German welfare offices. Using random assignment of cues about ethnicity and other characteristics in requests to welfare offices, it is shown that putative non-German applicants receive replies at the same rate as putative Germans, but are disadvantaged in terms of the substantive quality of responses. This suggests that minority populations do experience discrimination when attempting to access social benefits. Finally, the third essay uses micro-level voter file data from Illinois to measure whether property tax limitations reduce participation in local elections. In contrast with prior research, results from panel regressions with matching adjustments suggest that tax limitations do not affect political participation negatively. Together, these essays contribute to our understanding of public finance and social policy in contexts characterized by multi-level governance.
Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched. Available literature focuses heavily on policy and institutional design concerns framed by public finance, fiscal federalism, and public management principles. The literature tends to explain unsatisfactory outcomes largely as a result of some combination of flawed design and management of intergovernmental fiscal systems, insufficient capacity, and lack of political will. These factors are important, but there is room to broaden the analysis in at least two potentially valuable ways. First, much can be learned by more robustly examining how national and local political and bureaucratic forces shape the policy space, providing opportunities for and placing constraints on effective and sustainable reform. Second, the analysis would benefit from moving beyond design to considering how to implement reform more strategically.
Fiscal decentralization has been established in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but crises emerge at the local government level due to remaining problems of the fiscal administration system of tax allocation and the impact of replacing the business tax with a value added tax. The PRC taxation system requires readjustment and local governments have begun to focus on innovative financing models. The main path to stable and sustainable government finances is to maintain the general public budget and the government fund budget. The present chapter shows that use of innovative fundraising and financing channels will lead to the upgrading of local government infrastructure and public services. Suggestions for enhancing local government fiscal stability and sustainability include: reducing the fiscal burden at the local level by standardizing and legalizing outlay establishing a modern taxation system; establishing a standardized and predictable transfer payment system by introducing block transfer payments and prioritized transfer payments as a basis for a stable growth mechanism for general transfer payments; promoting public–private partnership legislation to encourage participation of social capital and maximize the multiplier effect of public expenditure; and improving the mid-term budget and debt-annexed budget and establishing a government planning mechanism for investment and debt financing of major infrastructure construction projects.
This thesis explored, in two parts, the macroeconomic impacts of exchange rate regimes (ERR), as well as the recent developments in fiscal policy and fiscal decentralization. Part I has reconsidered the role of ERR and its interplay with fiscal, monetary and tax policy. The first result that emerges (Chapter 1) is that fixed ERR can serve as a credible policy tool for stabilizing fiscal policy. However, this stabilizing effect is conditional upon the inter-temporal distribution of the costs of loose fiscal policy. In assessing the linkage between ERR and crises (banking/financial, currency and debt), Chapter 2 evidenced that the bipolar view is no longer valid, and that, crisis proneness rather depends on the macroeconomic fundamentals (the volatility of private sector credit, the deficit-financing mechanism, and the debt-to-GDP ratio). In Chapter 3, we unveiled a strong relationship between ERR and tax policy. Countries with pegged regimes have greater reliance on domestic taxation -such as the VAT- to make up for the loss of seigniorage revenue (substitution effect). Moreover, peggers tend to collect more VAT revenue to offset the shortfall in cross border taxes following the trade liberalization reform (competitiveness effect). Part II discussed the cyclical response of fiscal policy in high debt periods, and focused on fiscal decentralization issues. In Chapter 4, we showed that the reaction of fiscal policy to the business cycle is non-linear and conditional to the level of public debt. When the debt-to-GDP ratio goes beyond a certain threshold (87%), fiscal policy loses its counter-cyclical properties. Further, we highlighted that carefully-designed fiscal rules help maintaining counter-cyclicality through an ex ante disciplinary effect. Chapters 5 and 6 analyzed the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of public service delivery and fiscal policy performance, respectively. Chapter 5 revealed that a sufficient level of expenditure decentralization, coupled with revenue decentralization, improves the efficiency of public service delivery. However, the political and institutional environment is critical for reaping decentralization-led benefits. Lastly, Chapter 6 concluded that fiscal decentralization has destabilizing effect by reducing the counter-cyclicality of fiscal policy. In addition, we found that decentralization strengthens the structural fiscal balance; however, vertical fiscal imbalances reduce the benefits of decentralization. It is therefore critical to limit asymmetries between expenditure and revenue decentralization, so as to reduce the transfer-dependency of local governments to the central level, and thus prevent decentralization from weakening the fiscal stance at the general government level.
Local Government finance is of immense importance for a state and for the government functions of rendering services to the citizens. Local finances reflect the fiscal independence of municipalities and the financial capacity to carry out its responsibilities under the legal provisions of the central government. It is therefore very important to monitor the development of local finance in transition countries and in transferring experiences from countries with higher fiscal decentralization to countries which are pre-accesion candidates to EU. Countries with higher fiscal decentralization are more acceptable bycountries that are recently new members of the European Union under similar region. In this study, a parallel overview of the local finances of new member country in the EU, Slovenia and pre-accesion candidate country to the EU i.e. Macedonia, was taken
This thesis brings out the important roles that the public sector finance and reforms play in shaping nations' welfare through providing empirical evidence using new data sets on the links between government spending and inflation, and between fiscal decentralization and development outcomes for the four Asian emerging economies of India, China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Chapter 2 empirically tests the nexus between government spending and inflation for the three countries of India, China and Indonesia utilizing the cointegration and the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) method on time series data for the period 1970-2010. This chapter employs a bivariate VECM of government spending and inflation and, to address potential endogeneity concerns, two trivariate models with real GDP and nominal exchange rate separately added. The results show a cointegrating long-run relationship between government spending and inflation and that, in the short run, government spending can significantly influence the rate of inflation (positively for India and Indonesia while negatively for China). An important policy implication is that governments in the region would need to be more prudent regarding decisions to change government spending, which can potentially result in large fluctuations in inflation. Chapter 3 shifts the focus to fiscal policy matters at sub-national levels. This chapter examines the effects of fiscal decentralization on economic growth at the provincial level in Vietnam, an Asian economy with rapid growth performance resulting from the comprehensive reform, 'Doi Moi', starting in 1986. Using a newly available provincial-level dataset spanning the period 2004-2010, this chapter provides evidence that fiscal decentralization has had a significant and positive impact on provincial economic growth in Vietnam during the period of analysis. The measure of fiscal decentralization adopted captures both the fiscal capacity and autonomy of provinces. The fixed-effect and the Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) models help address the unobserved heterogeneity and potential endogeneity issues. Finally, Chapter 4 further quantitatively investigates the effects of fiscal decentralization on development outcomes. Specifically, the two main hypotheses to be tested in this chapter are whether fiscal decentralization had significant effects on poverty outcome and health outcome at the provincial level in Vietnam during the period 2006-2011. Given the important role of the agriculture sector, the chapter also tests for other hypotheses that are concerned with sectoral growth patterns, the contribution of agricultural growth to poverty reduction, and the urban-rural gap in poverty. The main results suggest that fiscal decentralization had a positive effect on health outcomes but, surprisingly, did not contribute to poverty reduction. Another finding is that agricultural sector has made a significant contribution to poverty reduction in dominantly agricultural provinces. Also, the poorer regions have benefited from agricultural growth more than growth in other sectors. Finally, the chapter does not find significant evidence for the urban-rural gap for poverty in Vietnam. On balance, from a policy maker's perspective, while growth-enhancing effects are encouraging, the potential distributional effects of fiscal decentralization warrant careful considerations of the reform agenda so that the poor and the disadvantaged can share the gains in potential benefits.
The reform of intergovernmental fiscal relations and budget required the development and approval of a significant number of regulations. This is due to the fact that each of the new organizational and legal forms (treasury, budget (public institutions of a new type) and autonomous institutions) have to be very essential features of the legal status of institutions, and the specifics of conducting basic and income-generating activities. Reforming the budget system of Russia is carried out for decades, but despite all efforts, the public sector is one of the weakest and most fragile sectors of the economy. Fiscal reforms are carried out on the Russian way «optimal decentralization», whose principles and concepts were borrowed from contemporary European experience of reforming the management of public finances. This concept involves the creation of a stable interest and incentives for all participants in the budget process to achieve specific, measurable and socially significant results.
Recent theoretical research suggests that financing sub-national governments’ expenditure out of own revenue sources is linked to more responsible budgeting, because the financial implications of spending decisions then are internalized within a jurisdiction. We test this proposition empirically on a sample of 23 OECD countries over the 1975-2000 period, and find evidence in line with the hypothesis that greater revenue decentralization (measured as sub-national governments’ share of own source tax revenues in general government tax revenue) is associated with improved sub-national government budget deficits/surpluses. This finding is cross-validated with a novel, independent dataset consisting of all 34 OECD member states from 2002 to 2008.
The purpose of this paper is to give a general overview on the decentralization process and on the financial autonomy of local government units in Albania. The principal base for the analysis done is the legal framework, accompanied shortly with examples of its implementation in several communes or municipalities. The paper is organised in 3 issues, which treat respectively the organization of local government in Albania, decentralization of functions and responsibilities in favour of the units of local government, and their budget and resources of financing. There has been some difficulties in practice during decentralization process raised out when fulfilling the whole legal framework on exercising exclusive and shared competences of local units of government, because of the dependence by the respective institutions for the implementation of legal acts for exclusive and shared functions in the fields of education, economic support and health care, and by lack of funds of the responsible ministry to transfer the service of water supply. In Albania seems yet early to give right importance to regions, and especially with regard to the aspirations for European integration many challenges raise to the Albanian institutions.