This paper assesses the interactions of horizontal fiscal equalisation schemes with debt policy by sovereign regional governments. Local public goods are either financed by debt or taxation. A horizontal equalisation scheme eleviates regional public revenue disparities under horizontal and...

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction in the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal tolerable size of government has...

This paper assesses the interactions of horizontal fiscal equalisation schemes with debt policy by sovereign regional governments. Local public goods are either financed by debt or taxation. A horizontal equalisation scheme elevates regional public revenue disparities under horizontal and...

Motivated by the recent experience in the Russian Federation, this paper examines the implications of imposing central control on the budgetary activities of a subnational government. In a highly stylised multi-task principal-agent model (Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991)), a central government...

Motivated by the Russian experience, this paper examines the implications of imposing central control on the budgetary activities of a subnational government. In a multi-task principal-agent model, the center cannot monitor directly the informal budgetary operations of a region, but it can exert...