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...

This paper analyze the structure of the standard fiscal needs (SFN) of local allocation tax grants in Japanese prefectural data. The previous works on SFN reported that the scale effect of SFN (a U shaped per capita SFN curve) are observed in Japan. We mainly showed the per capita SFN has the...

This paper examines a number of traditional characteristics of the Swedish welfare state, and discusses how they have been changed over time, especially since the economic crisis in the early 1990s. It emphasizes that the country did not only suffer from the economic crisis and recent...