The need for infrastructure building, replacement and updating is large worldwide and governments - particularly subnational governments - will need to mobilise budgetary resources while simultaneously restoring public finances to sound health and meeting other spending pressures. This paper...

Local governments often set up inter-municipal consortia to provide public services jointly, rather than individually. The main benefits of joint provision include the potential for improved cost-effectiveness arising from gains from economies of scale and the internalisation of costs and/or...

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...

The main objective of the paper is to assess the status of urban decentralization in the state of Jharkhand in India and to relate it to some major implications on service delivery. We find that while some of the functions are assigned to the local bodies on paper, none of them are transferred...

Fifty years of experience tells us that the right game for tax researchers and outside agencies interested in fostering better sustainable tax systems in developing countries researchers is not the short-term political game in which policy decisions are made. The right game for them is instead...

More effective taxation of agriculture is central to the development issue. An OLS cross-country regression across developing countries shows that every one percent increase in the share of agriculture in value addition lowers the tax/GDP ratio by a little over one-third of one percent, after...

Poor and insufficient school infrastructure negatively impacts student learning and schooling outcomes. Myriad factors have contributed to an infrastructure gap in the education sector in many countries – rapid increases in enrolments, poor maintenance and aging capital stocks, rural to urban...

Although VATs applied simultaneously within the same country by different levels of government were long considered to be either undesirable or infeasible, two quite different types of sub-central VATs – regional consumption taxes and local business taxes -- now exist in a number of countries....

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...

In this paper we analyze the hard-to-tax, asking the basic question: Why should the HTT matter to policy makers? We begin in Section Two by attempting to identify both the HTT and the main parameters of the problem. Section Three examines some of the impacts of the hard-to-tax, looking at...