The paper uses China's recent experience to investigate the potential tradeoff between economic growth and regional equity in the design of fiscal decentralization policy. Although present in other countries, this policy tradeoff has been particularly relevant to China over the last two decades....

In this paper, we use pooled data for central-provincial and provincial-local governments in 2000-01, overall involving over 4000 sub-provincial governments, to assess China 's sub-national fiscal equalization practices and outcomes. Our goal is to explain horizontal fiscal disparities between...

This paper presents a simple model to analyze the corrupt behavior of the delivery agency in a donor-delivery agency-recipient organization. Corrupt behavior of the delivery agency can take two forms: (i) “pocketing” or where the delivery agency distributes only a portion of the relief fund...

This paper investigates the potential tradeoff between economic growth and regional equity in the design of fiscal decentralization policy in the context of China's experience. We develop a theoretical model of fiscal decentralization, where overall national economic growth and equity in the...

The main objective of the paper is to propose a framework in which fiscal health conditions can be assessed and the main determinants affecting fiscal health can be identified, inspite of severe data constraints. The paper draws on big urban agglomerations in India as well as smaller cities as a...

China has been carrying out a significant fiscal decentralization policy for over three decades. However, reforms have largely concentrated on the revenue side of budgets, and generally they have not been coordinated with an explicit strategy for the decentralization of expenditure assignments....

The article investigates the potential impact of corruption on economic growth by examining the effect that corruption may have on several significant determinants of economic growth, namely, investment in human, private and public capital, and on governance. Our theoretical approach allows for...

A frequent finding in the local public finance literature is that renters are more likely to support expansions in the local budget than are homeowners. The renters' illusion hypothesis (renters are less aware of tax increases than are homeowners) has been commonly used to explain this behavior...