Regional diversity may influence the nature and effectiveness of public sector activities through many economic and political channels. The most important and prominent manifestation of diversity in Canada has been the rise to dominance in the largely francophone province of Quebec of a...

In this paper, following an introductory section setting out some salient characteristics of the country and its key institutions, we examine three aspects of Canada’s federal arrangements over the last half century. We have chosen these three examples to illustrate, first, an instance in...

In this paper, we examine the issue of the incidence of central government budgets in federal countries. In Section 1, we discuss a number of reasons why the picture painted of reality by even the best fiscal flow analysis is inevitably partial and hence inherently flawed to an unknowable...

Intergovernmental transfers are a major source of revenue for sub-national (regional and local) governments (hereafter SNG), representing 60 percent of their total revenue for developing countries and 33 percent for OECD countries (Shah, 2004). The continued and even growing decentralization...