Hungary has undertaken a bold and far-ranging reform of its system of subnational finances. This paper outlines the changes introduced in the system of local finance as a result of the 1990 Local Self-Government Act, and the 1990 Act on Local Taxes and provides a preliminary assessment of their...

The author examines the many faces of infrastructure decentralization: the costs and benefits, the government structure (constraint or variable?), the"polycentric"approach, and how to make decentralization work (for whom?). He proposes basic principles and guidelines for policy design, for both...

The decentralization of government in Eastern Europe represents a reaction both from below (to tight central political control) and from above (to privatize the economy and relieve the central government's fiscal stress). In all transitional economies, the developing structure of...

A successful poverty alleviation strategy has four distinct elements: 1) identifying who the poor are, where they are located, and what they do; 2) analyzing why they are poor; 3) developing policies to improve their standards of living; and 4) supplementing income-improving policies with...

This paper reviews the literature on tax assignment in decentralized countries. Ideally, own-source revenues should be sufficient to enable at least the richest subnational governments to finance from their own resources all locally-provided services that primarily benefit local residents....