Over the past decade, South Africa has experienced a rising pace of economic and social development which has facilitated the expansion of the basic social programs, especially in health and education. The education sector has been given a high priority by the National and Provincial authorities...

The purpose of this study is to develop a model to arrive at a joint optimizing strategy for capital budgeting for the construction of new school buildings and for the renovation of existing schools. This model provides a practical tool for ranking construction projects so as to yield the...

Fragmentation and severe inequalities in health status, health infrastructure and services were among the major problems the Limpopo Provincial Government had to deal with when they took office in 1994. Hence, as part of an intensive program of legislative and policy development to reform the...

The purpose of this study is to develop a model to arrive at a joint optimizing strategy for the use of a given capital budget for the construction of new school buildings and for the repair of the already existing schools. This is to be done in a way that will have the maximum positive impact...

The purpose of this study is to develop a model to arrive at a joint optimizing strategy for the use of a given capital budget for the construction of new school buildings and for the repair of the already existing schools. This is to be done in a way that will have the maximum positive impact...

This paper presents the first hedonic general-equilibrium estimates of quality-of-life and firm productivity differences across Canadian cities, using data on local wages and housing costs. These estimates account for the unobservability of land rents and geographic differences in federal and...

We report on the nature of a utility optimizing transfer from one regional government to another when local public goods are present. Computer examples reveal that small differences in regional endowments result in large differences in equilibrium outcomes for two regions, under optimal...

This paper investigates the efficiency argument for a vertical fiscal gap in a federation using a simple model of a central government and several identical states. Each level provides a public good to residents within its jurisdiction and finances it by taxing labour income and rents. If labour...

The Canadian system of equalization is designed to address differences in revenue-raising capacity across provinces, basing a province's entitlements on its actual tax bases. However, since it does so on a year-on-year basis, the standard against which a given province's equalization...

This paper presents a selective and non-technical survey of the role of intergovernmental equalization transfers as a device for achieving efficiency in the allocation of labor across regions in a decentralized nation, and for achieving fiscal equity among residents of various regions. We...