This paper sheds light on the heavy financial burden on peasants in China's fiscal decentralization system. Using a political economy framework, this paper explores the tax-farming nature of China's fiscally decentralized system and examines why the system incurs a particularly heavy financial...

A movement toward fiscal decentralization is underway in many countries across the world. This movement is partly justified by appeal to the classic argument of Tiebout (1956), who claimed that decentralized provision of public goods allows better fulfillment of diverse individual demands. Many...

This study of China demonstrates how the allocation of fiscal resources between the central and local governments has affected economic growth since reforms began in the late 1970s. We find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization of government spending is associated with lower provincial...

The main macroeconomic questions about decentralization are whether it has led to an overall expansion of the public sector or to unsustainable fiscal deficits. In the long term, subnational spending contributes to a larger overall government sector, but steady subnational deficits do not affect...

This paper extends the Barro (1990) model with single aggregate government spending and one flat income tax to include public expenditures and taxes by multiple levels of government. It derives the rate of endogenous growth and, with both simulations and special examples, examines how that rate...

Beyond conducting the usual regression analysis of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and aggregate government size (national and subnational combined), this paper makes the first attempt to examine how different fiscal decentralization measures affect the sizes of national and...

This paper sets up a theoretical model linking the growth rate of the economy to the growth rate and volatility of different government expenditures. On a theoretical basis, it is found that volatility in government spending can be positively or negatively associated with economic growth...

In this paper, we study the optimal choices of the federal income tax, federal transfers, and local taxes in a dynamic model of capital accumulation and with explicit gamestructure s among multipleprivateage nts, multiplelocal governments, and the federal government. In general, the optimal...