This insightful study examines the decentralization experiences from 15 countries in different regions of the world. All of these countries have actively attempted to decentralize, or continue to do so, and have faced obstacles serious enough to either derail or significantly delay their...

The year 1991-92 was one of the toughest years for the Indian economy. All the macroeconomic indicators became adverse. The overall economic growth slumped to a mere 1.1%. The gross fiscal deficit stood at 8 % of the GDP and the revenue deficit on the current account at 3.5 % in 1990-91. Prices...

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the structure and performance of the Corporate Income Tax in Spain over the last 25 years. We will study the reasons, principles and objectives of the reforms undertaken and will examine the context of these amendments through the evolution of the basic...

Like individuals and businesses, subnational governments sometimes face financial difficulties. Subnational government can get into financial problems in various ways, sometimes through economic or social misfortune; sometimes through incompetence or malevolence; sometimes through a stubborn...

The general idea is the following: any tax authority that respects basic human rights has to impose taxes on a base to avoid random and arbitrary taxation. The tax base should be announced prior to the imposition of the tax and therefore, taxpayers are given an advanced warning concerning the...

The determinants of corruption have long been an important subject for research in the elds of economics and political science. The literature has identied a wide range of factors that cause corruption; however, little research has been done on how the design of government policy in uences...

The purpose of this paper is, very generally, to provide a framework and potential methodology of analysis of tax incentives in one country — South Africa. As incentives are often specific and targeted, the precise methods needed to analyze the effectiveness of incentives may well differ among...

Using a nationwide county-level panel dataset for the years 1995-2009, this paper conducts the rst analysis in the literature to examine the impacts of scal decentralization and scal equalization, both measured at the sub-provincial level, on intra-provincial inequality in China. While scal...

A general global precept is that agglomeration forces lead to migration from rural to urban areas. Yet, for much of the period since the early 1970s, more people moved from metro to nonmetro U.S. counties. The underlying causes of this pattern have changed over time with economic shocks and...