While nation states debate climate policy at an international scale, on a local level, cities across the globe have committed to emission targets and mitigation activities. This study analyses the actual performance of municipal climate action against their targets. Official information material...

How do we know whether a country suffers from vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI)? What should be done about it? Academic appreciation of these issues in general, and the nature of political behaviour in particular, both have major implications for the way federations are fiscally structured. While...

Cooperative federations are usually characterized by the existence of bailout guarantees and intergovernmental transfer schemes. This paper explores whether such features of cooperative federations lead to subnational soft budget constraints using panel data from the German States covering the...

Economic models of Fiscal Federalism, according to different settings, are generally linear and static, offering unique and deterministic solutions starting with simplifying assumptions. This paper rises from the idea to investigate how the decision-makers, abandoning their traditional economic...

The paper discusses moral hazard problems as a potential reason for the observed strong increase of indebtedness of German states (Länder). Indeed, financial markets do not react much to the strong differences in fiscal fundamentals of German Länder. Using a case study, the paper also shows...

In the last two decades there has been a worldwide interest in decentralization of government in all parts of the world. There are two main objectives that we tried to achieve through this study. Firstly, we tried to examine empirically the effects of decentralization on macroeconomic stability....

The 1999-2006 versions of the Italian Domestic Stability Pact had many shortcomings and a modest impact with respect to the aim of aligning the fiscal behaviour of sub-national government units with the national commitments under the European Stability and Growth Pact. The Domestic Pact was...

According to the Nigerian constitution, main public sector responsibilities are split across various government levels. Thus, no sole government could deliver radical improvements in service delivery on its own, which means that coordination and cooperation are pre-requisites. However, the...

Recent attempts of "regionalizing" the VAT, in order to expand fiscal autonomy margins attributed to Regions and to involve them in the hard struggle against tax evasion, strongly urge some considerations on some of the changes introduced in the Italian legal system by the 2001 constitutional...

The issue of standard costs is the subject of the bill Calderoli (A.C. n. 2105), which must be implemented by the article 119 of the Italian Constitution. It should be noted, in this regard, that in economic theory have been proposed several formulations of the concept of standard cost, which...