This work analyses the problems that arise in the provision of social policies of the Welfare State in a fiscal federalism context. While both the Welfare State and decentralisation processes have separately deserved a great attention of the literature, the mutual implications of both issues...

We analyse the redistributive power of the Spanish central government budget to diminish regional disparities in per capita income in the 1991-1996 period. It firstly makes a brief overview of the most relevant empirical studies carried out on this subject, analysing their methodologies and...

The democratic Constitution of 1978 set up a decentralised state in Spain. Since then, the Autonomous Communities (intermediate level of government) have strongly increased their role and currently represent around 25-30% of total public expenditure. Thus, financing autonomous government has...

By means of a dynamic panel data analysis, and using a database from municipalities of the province of Barcelona (1993-99), we describe their process of fiscal adjustment to a shock in tax capacity. About 25% of the shock is internalized through an increase in tax effort, 35% through a reduction...