Introduction: the relevance and conceptualisation of local finance regulatory regimes

Although local governments are essential providers of public services and infrastructure across Europe, they ultimately depend on funding from higher levels of government. The clear relevance of local government finances necessitates effective regulation in order to ensure financial sustainability, but as of yet there has been hardly any comparative research regarding this particular topic. The 18 chapters contained in this volume bring together the work of 40 experts in the disciplines of political science, economics, and public administration research to approach the subject of local financial regulation in various scales and contexts across Europe. In this introductory chapter, we first outline key concepts such as fiscal decentralisation and regulation and briefly describe associated underlying theories and research. Secondly, we present comparative fiscal data to demonstrate the variance and trends of fiscal decentralisation across Europe. It also introduces the concept and components of regulatory regimes and develops the argument, that the effectiveness and outcome of fiscal regulation depends not only on the quality of individual components but also on the interactions of those components. We finally present the three guiding questions of this volume and provide a short overview of the chapters to follow.