Efforts to maintain balanced budgets lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in states' capital investments, transfers to local governments, and spending in areas like education and transportation. Reliance on volatile revenue sources predicts relatively severe volatility in these expenditures....

Using a unique set of electoral rules present in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg, we explore the question whether local electoral rules affect the size of local governments. We find evidence that party--list system is associated with higher levels of expenditure and that direct elections of the...

We analyze the effects of political business cycles and fiscal autonomy on the expenditure categories of Polish municipalities. Using System GMM technique, we find convincing evidence for strong political business cycles in almost all expenditure categories, and in particular for the categories...

Article about the problems of municipal governments related to fiscal consolidation in the Russian regions and the construction of the vertical of power during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin. The author analyzes the impact of the decline of the financial base of the city governments and...

The paper considers the influence of federal government expenditures and transfers on interregional convergence in gross regional product (GRP) per capita and wages in Russia over 2005--2011. Such an influence is not found. The federal government's policy was reactive and was not focused on...

A relevant mismatch between tax and expenditure decentralization characterizes many industrialized countries. The former is usually less pronounced than the latter, resulting in asymmetric fiscal decentralization arrangements. We investigate the nature of this asymmetry using a theoretical...

The second generation fiscal federalism (SGFF) approach is used as a reference to analyze the political and fiscal institutional design of Bolivia’s decentralization model and its evolution. Subnational public finance data up to 2008 is used to verify that decentralization of expenditure was...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the effects of municipal mergers in Japan’s local public expenditure. In order to evaluate the expenditure of municipal...

In this paper, the public burden for physical check-up of pregnant women is considered. This is a public expense that must be implemented by local governments independently. Public expenditure in this regard may be determined strategically by local governments to take into account the public...

The right way to measure the degree and extent of the different aspects of fiscal decentralization has been a long-debated, yet underdeveloped issue. There has been little consensus on the right approach to developing a single indicator which is sometimes needed to show a general trend in fiscal...