This pilot study presents indicators that assess sub-central government (SCG) spending power by policy area. Traditional indicators – such as the share of SCG in total government spending – are often misleading as they underestimate the impact of central government regulation on sub-central...

Tax competition is the strategic interaction of tax policy between sub-central governments (SCG) with the objective to attract and retain mobile tax bases. Tax competition rests on firms’ and households’ willingness and ability to shift the tax base – i.e. profits, capital, income,...

This paper compares and analyses the use of market mechanisms in core sub-central policy areas, namely education, health care, transport, social protection, and environment. Arrangements like tendering, outsourcing, user choice and competition, user fees and performance-related funding can help...

This paper provides an update of the indicators that measure the tax autonomy of sub-central governments in OECD countries. Over the last decade, tax autonomy at the state level increased, while it hardly changed at the local level. The OECD now has tax autonomy indicators for the years 1995,...

Tax competition is the strategic interaction of tax policy between sub-central governments (SCG) with the objective to attract and retain mobile tax bases. Tax competition rests on firms’ and households’ willingness and ability to shift the tax base – i.e. profits, capital, income,...

This paper describes the progress that has been made since 2006 in establishing statistical databases on tax autonomy and intergovernmental grants, aiming to better understand sub-central finance and intergovernmental fiscal relations. The paper is divided into two parts: a first part on taxing...

Tax sharing and intergovernmental grants are two sub-central funding arrangements that are often difficult to disentangle. The dividing line is not drawn uniformly across OECD countries or across time, and rules established in National Accounts, Revenue Statistics and others give incomplete...

Fiscal equalisation is a transfer of fiscal resources across jurisdictions with the aim of offsetting differences in revenue raising capacity or public service cost. Its principal objective is to allow sub-central governments to provide their citizens with similar sets of public services at a...

The world is recovering from the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. The recovery will probably be shallow and government deficits could remain very large over the next few years in a number of countries. The crisis has a negative impact not only on central...

This paper analyses trends and driving forces in the revenue composition of sub-central government (SCG). Between 1995 and 2005 the share of SCG in total government spending increased significantly from 31 to 33 percent while the SCG tax share remained stable at around 17 percent, increasing...