Measuring the Regional Incidence of Taxes and Public Expenditure: The Available Methodology and its Limitations

This article reviews the basic methodology used to estimate the regional incidence of taxes and public expenditure, which we call the fiscal incidence approach, and compares it with the cash flow approach, which measures tax revenues and expenditures in terms of the associated monetary cash flows. In this context, it considers critically the particular version of the cash flow approach used in Spain. The article also looks at the different ways in which economists have tried to decompose fiscal balances into a structural or distributive component and a cyclical component, and critically reviews present practices.