М.Л. Седова, Natalya Guz, М. Л. Дорофеев, Igor Viktorovich Balynin · 6 authors
In order to overcome negative demographic trends in the Russian Federation, measures to stimulate the birth rate have been developed and financed at the federal and sub-federal levels. At the moment, on the one hand, there is a tendency to centralize expenditures for these purposes at the federal level, on the other hand, the coverage of the subjects of the Russian Federation, which introduce sub-federal (subnational) maternity capital (SMC), is expanding. The study was recognized to answer the question: whether the widespread introduction of SMC is justified, whether the effect of its use depends on the level of subsidization of the region and the degree of decentralization of expenditures.
Abstract The last century was marked by a remarkable improvement in the economic position of women, as reflected in higher labor force participation and wages. This paper extends the Hybrid Tiebout models of residential choice to allow for two-worker households. Our model incorporates both residential choice and labor market choices of households simultaneously and, thus, gives us a unique opportunity to study the impact of changes in the labor market conditions for workers on residential segregation. We develop a general equilibrium model of residential choice with decentralized workplaces in which households face a trade-off among accessibility, space and a public good (education). Education is financed through property taxes, which are determined by majority voting. The quality of education is determined by the spending and the peer group effects. The model is interesting in the sense that (i) households consider the work locations of both male and female working members of the household while making residential choice decisions; (ii) the presence of decentralized workplaces offers an alternative job location to workers; and (iii) the endogenous labor supply decisions for workers. We find that the increase in educational attainment for women and the changes in wages for men and women have had a substantial impact on the spatial distribution of households across metropolitan areas and hence, segregation by income.
Andrew Aondohemba Chengе, Abel Ehizojie Oigbochie, Emem Udoh
Fiscal decentralization has become fashionable regardless of the levels of development and civilization of societies. Nations are turning to devolution to improve the performance of their public sectors. Fiscal federalism is concerned with the allocation of government resources, tax-raising powers, and spending powers to the various tiers of government. Despite the existing fiscal arrangement in the country, backed by the constitution, revenue deficits continue to impede government performance at all levels. The study aims to assess the impact of fiscal federalism on the structure of public spending in Nigeria. Friedman's theory of public expenditure was used as the theoretical underpinning of the study. The study adopted a mixed methodological approach to carry out the investigation. Documentary sources were used for data collection, while data analysis was done using descriptive statistics and content analysis. Findings of the study revealed that revenue yields had continued to dwindle in Nigeria at both national and sub-national levels between 2011 and 2021. The decline in government revenue yields was factored in by the fall in global oil prices and the lethargic nature of the non-oil sector. The study also established that the consequence of the feeble revenue base was that resultant government spending was directed more towards financing recurrent expenditure at the detriment of capital expenditure, thus crippling the drive to spur economic development. The study recommends that it is critical for the government to: Obliterate the present monolithic oil economy by emphasizing economic diversification to boost the financial base of the country and Prioritize public spending in favor of capital expenditure to propel economic growth and development.
<em>Female human capital is particularly a crucial pathway for the development of an economy as women consist of half of human resources. Despite the increasing trend of fiscal decentralization for the improvement of various socioeconomic indicators in Pakistan, there are very few attempts on its impact on human capital. This study increases the knowledge by empirically estimating the research hypothesis that how fiscal decentralization affects female human capital in Pakistan with 18th amendment in NFC as a backdrop taking the period from 1975 to 2020. The robust analysis shows that fiscal decentralization policy is helpful to frame female human capital in Pakistan. These results are particularly important for policy formulation for provinces to increase female human capital as well as for public finance sector in Pakistan.</em>
Vanessa T. Siy Van, Jhanna Uy, Joy Bagas, Valerie Gilbert Ulep
In recognition of the role of reproductive health in individual and national development, the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health (RPRH) Law of 2012 was passed in the Philippines after 30 years of opposition and debate. Seven years later, this article examined the cohesiveness of national multi-sectoral governance among state and non-state actors and identified challenges in coordination as part of the first comprehensive evaluation of the landmark policy. Using a qualitative intrinsic case study design and guided by the World Health Organization's systems checklist for governing health equity as our theoretical perspective, we conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with national implementers from health agencies (n = 11), non-health agencies (n = 6) and non-state actors (n = 3) that included civil society organizations (CSOs). Key themes identified through thematic analysis were supported with document reviews of policy issuances, accomplishment reports and meeting transcripts of the RPRH National Implementation Team (NIT). The study found that despite aspirations for vibrant multi-sectoral coordination, the implementation of the RPRH Law in the Philippines was incohesive. National leaders, particularly the health sector, were neither able to rally non-health sector actors around RPRH nor strategically harness the power of CSOs. Local resource limitations associated with decentralization were exacerbated by paternalistic financing, coordination, and monitoring. The absence of multi-agency plans fostered a culture of siloed opportunism, without consideration to integrated implementation. This case study shows that for neutral policies without conflicts in sector objectives, the interest and buy-in of non-health state actors, even with a national law, cannot be assumed. Moreover, possible conflicts in interests and perspectives between state and civil society actors must be managed in national governance bodies. Overall, there is need for participatory policymaking and health-sector advocacy to set health equity as an intersectoral goal, involving subnational leaders in developing concrete action plans, and strengthening NIT's formal accountability systems.
Each chapter of this thesis investigates one aspect of China’s taxation system. Chapter 1 investigates the introduction of accelerated depreciation (AD) for fixed assets investment in China as a natural experiment. In contrast to the large positive impact of similar tax incentives in the U.S. and U.K. found in recent studies, we document that AD was ineffective in stimulating Chinese firms' investment and that firms fail to claim AD on over 80% of eligible investments. We investigate information frictions as the primary driver of both facts. Chapter 2 documents new facts about the structure and drivers of China’s SI contributory base, with an emphasis on non-compliance. First, 54% of firms do not pay into the employer-based SI system leaving 35% of employees outside of SI coverage. Among participating firms, an estimated 85% of firms are not fully compliant. Second, compliance increases sharply with firm size. Third, China is unique in that SI administration and insurance pooling are done at sub-provincial levels. We investigate how this decentralization contributes to firm non-compliance. Chapter 3 applies the lessons from Chapter 2 to analyze China's primary fiscal response to the Covid-19 crisis: an exemption for firms from making SI contributions, resulting in an average tax cut of 21 percentage points on employment. Labor informality substantially reduces the reach of this fiscal response and skews the tax savings towards large firms. Offsetting this negative targeting is the much higher labor intensity of the firms most vulnerable and exposed to the economic shock, which creates a larger benefit from payroll tax cuts for these firms. Chapter 4 studies the transition from a turnover tax (TT) to a value-added tax (VAT). This reform, the largest Chinese tax reform in a quarter-century, mostly eliminated the taxation of firm inputs. We assess the effects on production, investment, and outsourcing. We find minimal effects on firm output but large increases in fixed asset investment. The latter is driven by an effective 17 percentage point reduction in the tax rate on fixed asset purchases. We also find mixed evidence on whether outsourcing increased due to the reform.
This chapter outlines the growth of credit programs from the Second World War through the postwar era. This period saw a surge in wartime credit, the end of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), and the emergence of government support for venture capital and school loans. As postwar credit programs moved capital and pioneered new ways of lending, they shaped how and where U.S. companies lent money. They also helped lift a generation of white families and systematically exclude African Americans. Discriminatory and decentralized, off-budget and complex, the credit programs were a key component of America's peculiar developmental state. Indeed, credit programs are not aberrations in the system. They are a core aspect of how the system works.
This paper explains, first, that, since households disregard the impact in the aggregate of their fertility and education choices on the return to their own savings, the market does not implement the mix of population and skills that a planner internalizing all externalities from fertility and education would choose. It then shows that for an economy without capital over-accumulation—the empirically relevant case, cf. Abel et al. (Rev Econ Stud 56(1):1–19, 1989)—a market supplying efficiency units of labor beyond the planner’s level does so by leading households to go for quality over quantity in their reproductive choices—over-investing in education and depressing fertility with respect to the planner’s levels—a feature reminiscent of reproductive patterns in developed economies. It is finally shown that a pension scheme contingent to the household’s fertility and education investment decentralizes the planner’s allocation as an equilibrium outcome. Such pension scheme is financed through a tax on the increase in labor income that results from households education investment. Interestingly enough, the usual tax-financed compulsory education does not decentralize the planner’s allocation, even when the mandatory level of education is the planner’s, since it does not address the misalignment of incentives at the heart of the problem.
In this article, I advance a theory of gendered money and demonstrate how couples give special symbolic meaning to men’s money in domestic exchanges. Unlike previous perspectives on gender and money such as resource theories and gender performance, this framework acknowledges money as a prop and tool that couples use to construct gender boundaries and signal normalcy in the marital relationship. Integrating concepts from economic sociology with Hochschild’s insights on the symbolism of domestic labor, I find that Ukrainians use money as a token and symbol of value, not as a commodity with which to obtain desired outcomes. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 56 married and cohabiting individuals, I discover that couples subvert market meanings of money to enact a Soviet-style gender ideology. By spending men’s money on “necessary” items and avoiding accessing women’s money in the household, couples construct men’s money as both visible and valuable while rendering women’s money non-fungible. These practices highlight the primacy of culture and ideology over relative income, and can help explain the reproduction of male privilege in the household, despite gains in women’s employment and earnings.
Renate Hartwig, Robert Sparrow, Sri Budiyati, Athia Yumna · 7 authors
We exploit variation in the design of subnational health-care financing initiatives in Indonesian districts to assess the effects of these local schemes on maternal care from 2004 to 2010. The analysis is based on a district pseudopanel, combining data from a unique survey among District Health Offices with the Indonesian Demographic and Health Surveys, the national socioeconomic household surveys, and the village census. Our results show that these district schemes contribute to an increase in antenatal care visits and the probability of receiving basic recommended antenatal care services for households that are not targeted by the national health insurance programs. We observe a decrease in home births. However, there is no effect on professional assistance at birth. We also observe variation in scheme design across districts as well as constraints to the effectiveness of local schemes. Including antenatal and delivery services explicitly in benefits packages and contracting local rather than national health-care providers increases the effects on maternal care. Increasing population coverage reduces effectiveness, delineating limitations to local funding and risk pooling. Furthermore, we do not find any effects for districts outside Java and Bali, where access to basic health care remains a key policy concern.
This paper reexamines the Barro growth model taking into account status-seeking behavior. Agents care about both consumption and social status, which is determined by their relative consumption in society. Public capital as production input is financed by income tax or lumpsum tax. We discuss different measures to reach the optimal growth and optimal welfare in a decentralized economy and find that under some parameter conditions, there are some government sizes for which the decentralized growth is optimal, and this result does not require corrective taxation policy. We also find the superiority of income tax versus lump-sum tax from the point of view of optimal growth in a decentralized economy and of social welfare. Besides, we propose corrective tax programs with constant capital tax or subsidy and time-varying consumption tax that enable an economy to reach the first-best optimal growth. The extension to a congestion model modifies somewhat the results. We discuss conditions under which the first-best or the secondbest optimal growth is attained in a decentralized economy.
Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Informal taxation is widespread, particularly in rural areas, with substantial in-kind labor payments. The wealthy pay more, but pay less in percentage terms, and informal taxes are more regressive than formal taxes. Failing to include informal taxation underestimates household tax burdens and revenue decentralization in developing countries. We propose a simple model of information and enforcement constraints that parsimoniously explains the patterns in the data.
In order to understand the impact of specific maternal health interventions, it is necessary to understand the likely effect of the health system structure. An important aspect of this structure is the organizational culture. Many systems in low-income countries have been based on a centrally planned and financed system. In recent years a series of organizational changes have been introduced into many systems and these substantially alter the way in which the system operates and impacts on reproductive health care provision. The main changes reviewed in this paper are: (i) decentralization, (ii) privatization and (iii) integration and sector wide approaches. Each of these changes is seen to have important implications for reproductive health. In each case it is clear that the nature of the impact depends crucially on the way it is implemented. Quantifying the impact of these changes remains extremely difficult given the many different ways they can be introduced and the many confounding factors that affect the overall impact. The literature does, however, point to a number of key issues that impinge on the way in which change is likely to affect reproductive health initiatives.
Tertiary education in the U.S. requires large investments that are risky, lumpy, and well-timed. Tertiary education is also heavily subsidized. By making the risk of human capital investment more acceptable, especially to low wealth households, subsidies may increase investment in human capital, lower long-run inequality, and reduce aggregate precautionary savings. However, subsidies also encourage more poorly prepared students to attend and are usually financed via distortionary taxes. In this paper, we find that observed collegiate subsidies improve welfare substantially relative to the fully decentralized (zero subsidy) outcome. We show that subsidies help smooth consumption, lower skill premia, increase interest rates as precautionary savings fall, lower the inequality of both consumption and wealth, increase intergenerational income mobility and raise welfare, even when financed by distortionary taxes.
Stan Chervin, Kelly D. Edmiston, Matthew N. Murray
Decentralized systems of government finance give rise to fiscal disparities due to interjurisdictional variations in tax bases and expenditure needs. Intergovernmental aid is used to address such disparities. This article explores changes in local tax capacity and intergovernmental aid resulting from urban shopping malls that extract retail sales and sales tax revenue away from surrounding areas, especially rural counties. A model is developed and estimated to determine the impact of urban malls on local government sales tax bases, controlling for sales tax rate differentials and other factors. The results reveal a 15.9% decline in the sales tax base for counties in close proximity to two newmalls. The analysis is extended to examine impacts of changing local tax capacity on state education aid. Based on the programconsidered here, less than 20% of the loss in own-source revenue is recovered through increased aid.
This Article argues that the restoration of a communitarian approach to taxation can help soften the widespread anti-tax sentiment that has engulfed the United States. It proposes and analyzes a concrete plan for the collection of revenue that taps into the same sense of shared community sacrifice that was invoked in fourteenth-century England. It proposes that the United States adopt a modernized, decentralized system of revenue collection modeled after the requisition, which was the chief means of raising revenue in the early American republic. Whereas the federal government currently collects approximately seventy percent of the nation's tax dollars, and the state and local governments collect the remaining thirty percent, this Article contemplates how the United States, and the individual states themselves, might differ if those numbers were reversed. The article begins by explaining why, due to the historical peculiarities of America's fiscal history, a decentralized approach to collecting revenues is not currently under consideration. Further, the article proposes a tax system in which the federal government would abolish the individual income tax, and discusses the likely effects of such a program on governmental spending by the states and on citizen mobility. The Article then explores the justifications for such an approach to taxation. The Article also consists of a utilitarian analysis of the costs and benefits of shifting to requisitions finance. Finally, the Article confronts the serious policy challenges that would arise if society were to implement requisitions finance, and ends with a discussion of several variations on the requisitions finance model that can address several of the communitarian and utilitarian criticisms.
Public responsibility for health care can be justified by ambitious egalitarian objectives, as it is commonly believed that the private sector generates greater disparities than the public sector. Government institutions can be designed to achieve equality in provision of health services. The article addresses the geographical distribution of primary care physicians in Norway, where primary physician services are the responsibility of local governments, primarily financed by general taxation. The authors analyze the allocation of physicians using a local government demand model, a synthesis of consumers' demand and local government resource allocation. Analyses were performed on a panel data set of all Norwegian municipalities covering the period 1986-1992. The results are encouraging. A decentralized system of primary physician services does seem to be fairly effective in securing equity in access to these services for the municipal population. In particular, local governments seem to respond well to the health care needs of their populations. Distribution of physicians is only to a very small extent dependent on the wealth of the municipality.
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.
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.