The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of economic openness on the vertical structure of the public sector within a country. To tackle this issue we set up a simple theoretical model of fiscal federalism, where both central and local public spending enter the objective functions of...

This paper addresses the issues of whether and how the degree of economic integration may affect central government tax revenues and the intensity of decentralisation. To this purpose, we empirically test the direct impact of economic integration on central tax revenues using the concept of...