At just under £8 billion, spending on schools and childcare is the second-largest area of public service spending in Scotland, behind spending on health. While councils rather than the Scottish Government itself determine how much to spend on schools, they do so in the context of a funding and...

The UK government is consulting on significant reforms to how funding from central government is allocated between English councils. From 2026-27, there will be a new system for allocating funding between councils, which will take account of new official assessments of councils' spending needs...

Are European municipalities ready to lead the green and social infrastructure transition? The EIB Municipalities Survey 2024-2025 sheds light on this key question by analysing data from over 1,000 municipalities across the EU.

The UK government is consulting on significant reforms to how funding from central government is allocated between English councils. From 2026-27, there will be a new system for allocating funding between councils, which will take account of new official assessments of councils' spending needs...

Previous research on urban shrinkage has primarily focused on conceptual development and identifying underlying drivers. This paper seeks to extend this foundation by proposing a comprehensive analytical framework, grounded in a review of relevant literature, to examine the fiscal implications...

We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous...

The report provides a comprehensive analysis of Bulgaria's local public finances, focusing on key challenges faced by municipalities and potential reforms. The report's goal is to provide a better understanding of local fiscal capacity, the system of intergovernmental fiscal transfers, and...

In recent decades, decentralization reforms have surged across the Global South, aiming to bring governance closer to citizens. Despite extensive debate on their effectiveness, systematic methods to assess local government performance remain underexplored, particularly in data-constrained...

This paper examines the fiscal and extra-fiscal effects of decentralizing the collection of Brazil's rural land tax from the federal level to local governments. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we assess the impact of local tax enforcement on revenue, land use, and...

Die Finanzlage der Kommunen hat sich im vergangenen Jahr dramatisch verschlechtert. Städte, Landkreise und Gemeinden haben das Jahr 2024 mit einem bislang beispiellosen Rekorddefizit in Höhe von 24,3 Mrd. € abgeschlossen. Damit werden die bisherigen Rekordwerte aus den Jahren 1992 und 2003...

"In recent years, urban policy-makers have been urged to adopt the development of urban policies for shrinking cities from an urban management perspective. However, urban management in shrinking cities is a difficult problem because it is fiscally restrictive compared with cities with growing...

At just under £8 billion, spending on schools and childcare is the second-largest area of public service spending in Scotland, behind spending on health. While councils rather than the Scottish Government itself determine how much to spend on schools, they do so in the context of a funding and...

Purpose - This paper explores how COVID-19 has impacted the shift from public participation by conventional means to e-participation. Specifically, we investigated to what extent COVID-19 has been a driver for electronic participation in community participatory budgeting, which is a kind of...

We set out the major challenges facing the adult social care system in England and explore potential future developments for the sector.

The special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system in England has faced unprecedented pressure over the past decade, and without substantial reform it will likely become unmanageable for local authorities over the coming years. Fundamentally, this is due to the rocketing number of...

A new, up-to-date system for allocating funding between councils is vital, and reforms must align with the broader vision for local government.

This chapter of our second annual Budget Report looks beyond 2024-25 to the medium-term outlook for the Scottish Government's funding, and the implications of the funding picture for the choices and trade-offs faced when allocating funding between areas of the budget. The Scottish Government had...

English councils saw big cuts to their funding during the 2010s, with spending on some services down between 40% and 70% over the decade. And although like virtually all public services, funding for local government was increased during the 2019-24 parliament, councils' finances are still under...

The Scottish Government's Budget for 2024-25 takes place at a time of particular uncertainty about the future funding environment. UK government spending plans both for the coming year and for later years seem likely to be topped up, but when and by how much is unclear. The current UK government...

Like spending on the NHS, and schools, English council funding has increased over the current parliament. But that follows a decade of austerity in the 2010s. And despite funding increases, councils are again under significant financial pressure, with increases in spending outpacing revenues and...

This chapter of our second annual Budget Report looks at Scottish tax policy and revenue, the overall amount of funding available for Scottish public services, and planned spending on different individual services in the coming financial year, 2024-25. In several important respects, the Scottish...

The economic benefits of tourism activity have led Portuguese municipalities to seek new financial resources that allow them to face new public expenses to mitigate the adverse effects of such growth, creating public policies that incorporate those effects. This research aims to analyse existing...

The study examined the specific features of using the instruments of financing the economic development of territorial communities on the example of Ukraine. Economic and statistical analysis methods were used to process the data, including the Wilcoxon signed-rank test for comparing growth...

The special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system in England has faced unprecedented pressure over the past decade, and without substantial reform it will likely become unmanageable for local authorities over the coming years. Fundamentally, this is due to the rocketing number of...

Small-scale federal democracies depend on the active participation of individuals in local political office. Both anecdotal evidence and empirical studies across Western democracies indicate a growing difficulty in recent decades to recruit candidates for municipal offices. This study examines...

Seit 2022 sind Inflation und Zinsniveau in Deutschland merklich erhöht. Wir arbeiten mittels einer Szenarienrechnung die Auswirkung der höheren Preise und Zinsen auf die Finanzierungssalden der Kommunen in Nordrhein-Westfalen heraus und berücksichtigen dabei systematische Unterschiede...

The Scottish Government's Budget for 2024-25 takes place at a time of particular uncertainty about the future funding environment. UK government spending plans both for the coming year and for later years seem likely to be topped up, but when and by how much is unclear. The current UK government...