States and their local governments vary both in their needs to provide basic public services and in their abilities to raise revenues to pay for those services. A joint study by the Tax Policy Center and the New England Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston uses the Representative...

This paper makes five contributions to designing a new fiscal regime for Scotland:1). It provides the intellectual case for fiscal autonomy in Scotland, and examines explicitly how far autonomy should go. 2). It provides a blueprint for how the tax system could be devolved, and explains why.3)....

This paper surveys the empirical research on fiscal institutions of the last three decades. The main results are: (i) Constitutional or statutory fiscal limitations have in most cases proved to be effective in cutting down public expenditure, revenue, and debt. (ii) Budgetary proce-dures matter...

The government's 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review was anything but comprehensive. The cuts to government spending were modest, and large swathes of state activity were barely touched. Britain will remain a heavily regulated, high-tax, high-spend economy. Instead of totally reviewing the...

Efforts to maintain balanced budgets, driven in part by formal requirements, lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in states' capital investments, transfers to local governments, and spending in areas like education and transportation. Extensive reliance on relatively volatile revenue sources...

Provincial budgets may normally make for dry reading, but in Alberta's case, there is plenty of suspense lurking inside the pages — and that's not necessarily a good thing. Your average family may know certain things about balancing a budget: keeping spending roughly in line with income; not...

This paper compares states in terms of their relative fiscal capacity, fiscal need, fiscal comfort, and tax effort in state fiscal year 1999 (FY1999). It is the most recent in a series initiated by the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) in 1962. As in previous...

The population in OECD countries is ageing rapidly, which will have significant macroeconomic impacts, including on public expenditure and tax revenues. This paper analyses the consequences of population ageing at the sub-central government (SCG) levels and introduces the ‘SCG fiscal...

This article uses simple and self-contained optimal control theory and martingale methods to find optimal government expenditure consistent with present value balance and, implicitly sustainable saving, borrowing, and tax levels as well, since long-term sustainable paths are, in principle, not...