This paper analyzes the lack of civic engagement in local government decision-making and the problems that result from it. I consider one explanation as viewed through public choice theory: dominant special interest groups capture local governments for their own private interests. Thus, average...

INTRODUCTION. Within the Latin American context Colombia is in a relatively advanced stage in terms of decentralization. According to the IDB (1997), it ranks third in the region after Argentina and Brazil, two countries organized as Federal States. While in 1995 average public expenditure...

The paper reconsiders the theory of fiscal federalism in a framework inspired by property-rights theory. We set up a two-period model where on a first stage a region in a federation can expend value-enhancing investments into a public project. The project can be implemented on a second stage,...

The paper stresses the financial aspects of building and organizing, in Italy, a Metropolitan City, typically represented by Milan. It starts by recalling the theoretical insights dealt with in a contribution written over thirty years ago by Giancarlo Mazzocchi, when the implementation of the...

We develop a model with two provinces, producing two goods: one mobile and the other not. The mobile good is taxed according to the destination principle by the local government; it is also federally taxed. People decide to buy the good at the most advantageous price. Namely they can buy...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether Spanish municipalities adjust in response to budget shocks and (if so) which elements of the budget they are more likely to adjust. The methodology we use to answer these questions is a vector error-correction model (VECM), estimated with data from a...

[ENG] This paper examines the structural characteristics of Unione di Comuni, a kind of local councils partnership recently supported by Italian law, trying to assess which factors most influenced the choice of functions and services to being managed associatively. It also analyzes the impact of...

We analyse, with a simple stylized model, the impact of the change of parameters of Need equalization formula for intergovernmental grants on productive efficiency of a local government providing a public service. In our context, this kind of efficiency means producing, at minimum costs and at...

This paper deals with interbudgetary relations and subnational finances in the Russian Federation. The authors focus on the issue of subnational budgets during the financial crisis of 2008. They analyze financial aid from the federal budget to regional authorities.