This paper explored the yardstick competition among Japanese municipalities in providing medical subsidy for infants and children. In recent years, against the background of rapidly declining birthrate in Japan, municipalities aimed to reduce the medical burden of families with small children....

Using a unique set of electoral rules present in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg, we explore the question whether local electoral rules affect the size of local governments. We find evidence that party--list system is associated with higher levels of expenditure and that direct elections of the...

We analyze the effects of political business cycles and fiscal autonomy on the expenditure categories of Polish municipalities. Using System GMM technique, we find convincing evidence for strong political business cycles in almost all expenditure categories, and in particular for the categories...

Studies presented in this publication were aimed at provide data necessary for the conducting of local government and citizenship dimension of the enlarged Polish foreign policy in Podlaskie region. The main objective was to investigate the diagnosis, as the local government units,...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a fiscal common-pool problem in a Japanese local government. Especially, we focus on the relationship between council size and land development expenditure of local government using a dataset of 13,989 municipalities in Japan from FY2001 to FY2006. We...

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This paper presents a conceptual analysis of terms belonging to the semantic field of state restructuring. The analysis aims to critically reviewing different terms focusing the attention both to the definitional and to the measurement sides. Different “types of decentralisation” are...

Which strategy of growth and economic convergences of the Moroccan regionals to the support of a constant economic growth?¶Called a long time the "economic miracle", the economic growth has causes, a dynamics and consequences.¶ In fact, it of it is nothing miracle since a vigorous growth can...

The paper written from a governance perspective takes the position that a useful governance perspective must be informed by the socio-economic-cultural milieu and in the specific Indian context must sit on a tripod of ‘political reality’, ‘state of decentralization’ and ‘basic economic...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the effects of municipal mergers in Japan’s local public expenditure. In order to evaluate the expenditure of municipal...