This paper gives a review on the theoretical foundation for fiscal decentralisation and a status quo analysis of the intergovernmental relations in Mongolia. It consists of two parts. Part I briefly reviews the theories of fiscal decentralisation and its impact on the nations' welfare...

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...

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...

This paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of China. Based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue sharing scheme, we construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem. We find evidence that...

Based on an analysis of 3,844 tax treaties, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and its Commentaries (VCLT), and case law of various domestic and international courts.The current orthodoxy maintains that courts are not required to compare all language texts of a plurilingual treaty but...

Federal spending on aid to the states increased from $286 billion in fiscal 2000 to an estimated $449 billion in fiscal 2007 and is the third-largest item in the federal budget after Social Security and national defense. The number of different aid programs for the states soared from 463 in...

This Discussion Paper deals with the institutional and economic aspects of the Brazilian federative state according to the 1988 Constitution. The context of vertical coordination of urban infrastructure investments is then examined. Previous studies have shown that the benefits of economic...

This Discussion Paper deals with the institutional and economic aspects of the Brazilian federative state according to the 1988 Constitution. The context of vertical coordination of urban infrastructure investments is then examined. Previous studies have shown that the benefits of economic...

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,...