Fan and Lv (2012) have convincingly argued that China's public debt, including borrowings by local governments, is relatively small and manageable. They have also correctly pointed out that over the last 10 years, while debt owed by local governments has surged, the government's contingent liabilities, which take into account the need to use public funds to bail out state-owned banks with large nonperforming loans, have declined sharply. I have little disagreement with Fan and Lv's conclusions, and my comments, which cover four major issues, are meant to clarify some details. My first comment relates to centralization versus decentralization. Fan and Lv argue that China has a centralized fiscal system (de jure) based on the facts that top local officials are appointed by the central authority, tax revenues largely accrue to the central government, and the central government monopolizes the right to issue debt to the public. However, some economists have argued that China has a decentralized system (de facto) based on the facts that local government expenditures are very large relative to the central government expenditure, formula-based equalization transfers are relatively small, revenues from land sales make up a large share of total local government revenues, and borrowing by local government “financing platforms” helps to fund infrastructure projects. Even if we accept that China has a centralized fiscal system, based on the case of Japan, which has a centralized fiscal system but is running one of the largest budget deficits in the world, I still have some doubts about whether centralization necessarily means fiscal prudence (small budget deficits and public debt) as argued by Fan and Lv. There is also a debate over whether decentralization favors economic growth. On the pro side, fiscal decentralization promotes competition among local governments, and it acts as a major force of economic development in China. On the con side, fiscal decentralization fragments the national market, encourages local protectionism, induces duplicated investment, and, hence, negatively affects economic growth. Second, I would put more emphasis on land prices and pension liabilities as major determinants of fiscal balances and, thus, the size of the public debt. A fall in land prices affects the fiscal position of local governments in the following two ways. On the one hand, it leads to a decline in their revenue, since proceeds from land sales are a major source of revenue for local governments. On the other hand, some local government financing platforms involved in property development (if not speculation) using funds borrowed from banks may have difficulty servicing those loans. Pension liabilities relating to urban workers under the previous pension regime, the so-called legacy costs, are estimated to range from 82% to 130% of 2008 gross domestic product (GDP), depending on assumptions made (World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, 2012). Ultimately, this obligation will have to be paid down through fiscal resources and should be counted as part of the government's contingent liabilities. Third, I think more attention should be paid to the future trends of revenues and expenditures when discussing fiscal sustainability. On the revenue side, growth in fiscal revenues is expected to slow down as the pace of China's economic growth declines due to demographic changes and to the diminishing advantage of backwardness as China approaches the stage of an advanced economy. On the expenditure side, there is a pressing need to further increase spending on education, health, social protection, and environmental protection. Part of these incremental expenditures could be met through a reallocation of spending away from infrastructure investment. Finally, I agree with the view expressed by the World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (2012) that enhancing fiscal sustainability in China calls for raising revenues by further reforms in the following six directions: (i) higher taxes or prices on energy, water, natural resources, and pollution; (ii) raising state-owned enterprise dividend payments to the general budget; (iii) further mobilizing personal income taxes, which make up only 1% of China's GDP compared with an average of about 6% in high-income countries; (iv) enhancing the taxation of motor vehicles and pricing of parking and congestion; (v) enhancing property taxes; and (vi) auctioning public resources such as bandwidth user rights, franchises for public utilities, and exploitation rights for natural resources. These measures should improve not only fiscal sustainability but also improve equity and efficiency for the Chinese economy as a whole.
Abstract Making use of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique and taking undesirable fiscal phenomena into account, this paper comprehensively quantifies the public finance performance of local governments in China during the course of fiscal decentralization reform. The introduction of undesirable fiscal outcomes into this assessment makes it possible to identify meaningful and informative characteristics of local public finance performance in China. When reforms are first implemented, local public financial performance improves because undesirable fiscal phenomena have not yet become too serious. The tax sharing system reform did not work well in its early stages, and negatively impacted public expenditure efficiency. The reform started to play a substantial role between 2001 and 2005, when local governments experienced better public finance performance. Corresponding to the deterioration of the financial sector in recent years, local public financial performance worsened after 2007. Further reform of the current fiscal and taxation system is necessary in China, to ensure a brighter future for the nation.
Abstract Significant developments of US state and local finance are converging in a manner that will newly frame the practices of state and local governance in the next decade and beyond. These trends can move from low-priority “problems to be addressed” to becoming urgent, high-priority concerns when the governments face economic and political shocks that are beyond their direct control—for example, the Great Recession (2007–2009). In this context, this article offers to bring together in the book the existing knowledge on the principles and practices of state and local finance. It takes an explicit look at how the issues proposed to be addressed fit into the broader framework of the practice of US intergovernmental relations (fiscal decentralization). The organization of the book is explained.
Abstract Several transition economies have undertaken fiscal decentralization reforms over the past two decades along with liberalization, privatization and stabilization reforms. Theory predicts that decentralization may aggravate fiscal imbalances, unless the right incentives are in place to promote fiscal discipline. This study uses a panel of 20 transition countries over 19 years to address a central question of fact: Did privatization help to promote local governments’ fiscal discipline? The answer is clearly ‘no’ for privatization considered in isolation. However, privatization and subnational fiscal autonomy along with reforms to the banking system – restraining access to soft financing – may prove effective at improving fiscal balances among local governments.
Serdar Yılmaz, François Vaillancourt, Bernard Dafflon
Abstract This article lays out the economists' view of why state and local government matters. To establish the economic framework, the article systematically works through the seminal contributions of Paul Samuelson's theoretical arguments of the importance of a public-sector role for efficiency in resource allocation; Charles Tiebout's thinking on the difference between national and local public goods; Richard Musgrave's classification of the fiscal “branches” of a decentralized federalist system; and Wallace Oates's Decentralization Theorem. It is from this platform that the article proceeds to address three fundamental fiscal policy issues for a multigovernmental society (e.g., US fiscal federalism): the sorting out of expenditure responsibilities among different types of governments (“expenditure assignment”); the question of which type of government should use which type of revenue (“revenue assignment”), and what happens when, for many state and local governments, the costs of the allocation of expenditure responsibilities are greater than that which can be financed from their “own” state/local revenues (the role of “intergovernmental transfers”).
This article discusses how the 7th National Finance Commission award and the 18th Amendment to the Constitution have strengthened the autonomy of the federating units in Pakistan. The former has empowered the provinces by increasing their access to financial resources, but there is the danger that it may increase the consolidated fiscal deficit unless both the federal and provincial governments increase their fiscal efforts and rationalize their expenditures. The 18th Amendment has the potential to change the structure of governance, but has been implemented in such a way that effective decentralization has been at least partially rolled back. For devolution to work in Pakistan, financing and the delivery of devolved services will have to be more effectively organized and managed.
Open access
Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
The record of subnational public finance during the 1980s and 1990s in Brazil and Mexico is well known: long periods of disequilibria caused by excessive debt accumulation at the state and municipal level, sometimes exacerbated by sharp currency depreciations but more often because of distorted incentives from central government implicit bailout guarantees, resulting in a series of fiscal crises and calling into question state performance at all levels of government in managing subnational fiscal policy. During the 1990s, however, piecemeal decentralization reforms were being pursued by fiscal policy makers, introducing new rules and regulations, including quantitative targets and market-based reforms, which laid the groundwork for putting subnational finances on a better footing during the 2000s. The politics of these reforms and the subnational fiscal stability achieved during the regional growth cycle of the previous decade have diverted attention away from the relationship between local public finance and external economic volatility.1 Given the nature of the transmission of the recent global economic crisis and the continuing deficit of global economic regulation, this seems to be a particularly salient field of inquiry. Recent literature on fiscal federalism, the so-called second generation, provides a basis for developing a loose analytical framework in which the Latin American experience of the previous decade can be considered. This literature extends the early normative models of fiscal frameworks constructed on assumptions of economic efficiency and willingness of public sector agents to identify market failures in the provision of collective goods, emphasizing the political, institutional and historical context in which the assignment of fiscal responsibilities occurs (Weingast 2009; Oates 2005). This approach is particularly suitable in the case of Latin America, not just because there is evidence of political patronage in the distribution of intergovernmental transfers (Timmons and Broid 2010), but because, in more general terms, fiscal decentralization has occurred during a period in which the state has made a clear reentrance in the areas of economic and social policy. Institutions, it would appear, are back in the picture – subnational included. Because this chapter is concerned with analyzing the operational resiliency of urban public finance during and after the recession in Brazil and Mexico, it is important to begin with an accurate model of the subnational features of the fiscal federal systems as they existed in the region at the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. For the purpose of our analysis, we can divide the municipal finance system into two inter-related tracks: politico-institutional and economic. Fiscal autonomy at the subnational level entails a certain accounting identity: local governments raise revenues from assigned tax bases, receive intergovernmental transfers, make expenditures and incur debt. However, the rules, both constitutional and budgetary (de jure), that define the accounting identity and norms of practice (de facto) that guide the fiscal behavior of subnational governments are determined by the nature and quality of political governance(Tommasi et al. 2001).2 The evolution of these rules and norms determines the effective distribution of spending assignments and revenue authority at the local level. The structure and distribution of fiscal responsibilities delineates the sensitivities of local governments to fluctuating economic conditions. Following a period of repeated fiscal crises in the 1990s, many with origins in excessive debt accumulation at the subnational level, the politico-institutional environment in which subnational governments manage their budgets in Latin America has been reshaped by the adoption of fiscal responsibility laws and subnational fiscal rules but also by continued dependence, with some reforms, on financial market regulations (Webb 2004). In principle, a number of benefits are derived from the implementation of fiscal responsibility legislation. It is argued that rules-based regulation makes subnational budgetary institutions more transparent, smoothing government expenditures over voting cycles, minimizing central government exposure to excessive subnational debt, and ensuring the sustainability of local service provision. In short, the intended effect is coordinated fiscal discipline across subnational government units. In practice, the efficacy of fiscal responsibility legislation is dependent, in part, on design, but also on implementation. That is, even though rules-based legislation to maintain fiscal balance at the subnational level might exist, if effective enforcement mechanisms are not in place, national governments face considerable levels of moral hazard from subnational governments operating under soft budget constraints (Ter-Minassian 2007).3
Андреас Каппелер, Albert Solé‐Ollé, Andreas Stephan, Timo Välilä
Spending on productive infrastructure is seen as an important contributor to long term economic growth. Several authors have documented a downward trend in public investment during the last three decades and warned about its possible detrimental effects on the economy. A not well-realized fact is that productive infrastructure investment is mostly provided by sub-national governments. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of revenue decentralization on the provision of infrastructure at the sub-national level. We estimate the effects of revenue decentralization and earmarked grant financing on the level of sub-national infrastructure investment in 20 European countries over the period 1990-2009. The findings are compared to those obtained when using sub-national investment in redistribution, for which the theory predictions are different. To account for the high auto-correlation in the dependent variable, we apply a dynamic panel data approach. In particular, we use a Corrected Least Squares Dummy Variable (LSDVC) estimator with the lagged dependent variable included to account for the dynamic character of the dependent variable. The empirical analysis shows that decentralisation in terms of tax shares increases public investment in infrastructure; public investment in redistribution is not significantly affected by decentralisation. The positive link between total regional investment and decentralisation suggests that decentralisation on regional infrastructure investment is additional and does not go hand in hand with a considerable reduction in other types of regional investment, such as health, education or safety. As to investment grants, they have a positive impact on both types of regional investment. The negative interaction between investment grants and decentralisation for regional infrastructure investment suggest that the impact of tax decentralisation on regional infrastructure investment declines with increasing receipts of investment grants by regional governments. This result is intuitive. As the significance of the tax-decentralisation parameter suggests, higher regional decision autonomy leads to more investment in infrastructure. Attempts to undermine the power of regions through the backdoor - e.g. by introducing conditional transfers - will at least partly offset the positive effect of decentralisation.
Núria Vergés Bosch, Mateu Espasa, Albert Solé Ollé
Contents: Preface 1. Inter-regional Fiscal Flows: Introduction to the Issues, Nuria Bosch, Marta Espasa Queralt and Albert Sole Olle PART I: COUNTING MONIES: MEASUREMENT AND PRACTICE OF INTER-REGIONAL FISCAL FLOWS 2. Regional Fiscal Flows: Measurement Tools, Giuseppe C. Ruggeri 3. Regional Fiscal Flows: Determinants, Measurements and Meanings, Francois Vaillancourt Comment by Nuria Bosch and Antoni Zabalza 4. Constitutional Reforms, Fiscal Decentralization and Regional Fiscal Flows in Italy, Maria Flavia Ambrosanio, Massimo Bordignon and Floriana Cerniglia 5. Measurement and Practice of Fiscal Flows: The Case of Belgium, Paul Von Rompuy 6. Balance Sheet Federalism: Canada, Giuseppe C. Ruggeri Comment by Francois Vaillancourt 7. Balance Sheet Federalism: Methodologies, Results and their Determinant Factors for Spain, Marta Espasa Queralt and Nuria Bosch Comment by Guillem Lopez Casasnovas and Ramon Barberan PART II: BEYOND THE DATA: WHY SOME REGIONS GET MORE MONEY? 8. Federalism and Inter-regional Redistribution, Jonathan Rodden Comment by Carles Boix 9. Decentralization by Politicians: Creation of Grants-financed Local Jurisdictions, Stuti Kehmani 10. The Political Rationale of Regional Financing in Spain, Sandra Leon Comment by Santiago Lago 11. The Determinants of Regional Transport Investment Across Europe, Achim Kemmerling and Andreas Stephan 12. The Determinants of the Regional Allocation of Infrastructure Investment in Spain, Albert Sole-Olle Comment by Germa Bel PART III: IN OR OUT? REGIONAL REDISTRIBUTION AND THE STABILITY OF FEDERATIONS 13. Federalism, Regional Redistribution and Country Stability, Enrico Spolaore Comment by Massimo Bordignon 14. The Costs and Benefits of Constitutional Options for Quebec and Canada, Francois Vaillancourt 15. Staying Together? Scotland and the Rest of the United Kingdom, David Bell 16. The Costs and Benefits of Staying Together: The Catalan Case in Spain, Elisenda Paluzie Index
Financing of local authorities is currently at the Centre of the political discourse is a daily concern. Romania faces, usually with an attempt to offset the need for control and reduction of public spending with greater financial autonomy of local authorities. At the time, it was searched and searches for a path, a means to achieve a fair distribution of financial resources between the various levels of administration, budget reductions to all of them. If strengthening democracy means to strengthen local autonomy, then it means you have created a system for financing local authorities to be efficient, fair and pointing towards the economic needs of States. In other words, decentralization and local financing and the principle of subsidiarity are mutually dependent. Rightly, the decentralisation of financial management is considered to be the "backbone" of the administrative system of decentralisation, the financial resources being those which are operational link between the needs of local communities and the rules necessary to satisfy them. Thus, the lack of financial resources of the local self-government can result in failure to meet the needs of its members, which at the same time failure of administrative decentralization. The decentralisation of financial management can also be seen as the Government of some specific functions on the line of management authority and the tax revenue to the local public authorities.
Following the gradual deepening of China’s decentralization reforms since reform and opening up in 1978, local governments have played an ever more prominent role in the entire vertical structure o...
Based on the phenomenon that serious inflation and local investment overheated coexist now,we establish one empirical model in order to investigates into the impact of local government investment impact on inflation under fiscal decentralization system.The study indicates that the local government’s investment in China form a positive factor in inflation,local government investment windens the needs of the community through the multiplier effect of stimulating.At the same time,the increased investment strengthen the dependence on the land finance,the two together promotes a rise in inflation.
Pablo Simón, Santiago Lago Peñas, Alberto Vaquero García
This paper studies the effect of political variables on the gains obtained by Spanish regions in periodical bargaining of the intergovernmental financing agreements and on the regional distribution of discretional earmarked grants over the period 1987-2008. First, we find that the relationship between gains in transferred revenues and on regional public debt stocks depends on the period and the specific issues discussed in the corresponding negotiation, aside from political affinity. Second, we show that the most discretional program of earmarked grants is strongly driven by electoral strategy. National incumbents tend to allocate intergovernmental transfers where there are competitive regional elections. Moreover, we show that earmarked grants are allocated in those regions where the incumbent performs better in national elections and, especially, in those where there are more seats to be won. Hence we prove that both strategies are complementary rather than exclusive.
In this article, we compare and contrast the design and performance of China and India’s intergovernmental fiscal systems. We find that there are remarkable similarities in the design and performance of China and India’s intergovernmental fiscal systems. More specifically, both countries have highly decentralized expenditures assignments and highly centralized revenue assignments. As a result, sub-national governments in both countries must rely on fiscal transfers to finance their assigned functions. Finally, there is considerable off the books and hidden borrowing by sub-national governments in both countries. We also find that there are considerable and growing disparities in the rate of expenditure decentralization among sub-national governments within each country. Lack fiscal discipline and growing fiscal disparities among sub-national governments create risks to future economic growth and to social cohesion, absent policy reforms to address these issues.
Three Essays on Local Public Finanace Lenka Šťastná Abstract The dissertation studies spending decisions of local governments. It consists of three parts; theoretical model is developed in the first part and empirical analyses of Czech municipalities of extended scope are presented in the other two parts. The theoretical model analyzes whether it is beneficial to decentralize policy decision-making when local public goods in two symmetric regions are complements. Strategic delegation when a voter intentionally votes for a politician whose preferences do not coincide with those of the voter and in-kind transfers, used to support local public goods production in the other region, are allowed. According to Oates' decentralization theorem, centralization pareto-dominates decentralization for symmetric regions regardless level of spillovers. However, for complementary public goods and when strategic delegation and in-kind transfers are considered, the tradeoff may be exactly opposite and decentralization may pareto-dominate centralization. The second part aims to test fiscal interaction among local governments in the Czech Republic which can be driven by spillover effects, competition, mimicking, or cooperation. Spatial dependence of local public spending (i.e. whether spending decisions in neighboring...