We assessed whether health spending of local government units in the Philippines is sufficient to deliver mandated primary health care (PHC) services under a devolved system, how PHC spending varies with fiscal capacity, and whether increased intergovernmental transfers following the...

Using cross-country data for 167 countries with broad post-World War II coverage and historical extensions to earlier periods, we quantify how deficits, taxes, and civilian spending respond to increases and decreases in military spending. On average, deficit financing dominates: a 1 percent-age...

The adoption of NATO's new 5% defence spending target reflects shifting US strategic priorities and places heavy demands on European allies. This article assesses whether European NATO members can realistically meet this target, combining evidence on past and projected military spending, fiscal...

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...

In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government's second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg as...

In any system for funding local government, there are inherent trade-offs between competing policy objectives. We have discussed these at length in a recent report (Phillips, 2024), and in our submission to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) December 2024...