The paper discusses some strategies by which the Member States of the EU are identified as Net Contributors or as Net Beneficiaries. The main strategies are the conception of the "operational" budgetary balances and the conception of the "general" budgetary balances. A comparison of these...

Recent literature on optimal nonlinear taxation has shown that in models with a single level of government public provision of private goods can help redistribution by mitigating self-selection constraints. The aim of the present paper is to extend the analysis to a fiscal federalism setting...

When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor affecting local governments; federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of local governments. In this...

A couple of months before the Swedish election in 1998, the incumbent government distributed 2.3 billion SEK to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities. This was the first wave of a four-year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable...

This paper provides a self-contained overview of the present problems of state finances in India. It begins with an overview of historical evolution and current institutional structures, including economic, political, administrative and fiscal aspects of India's federal system. The paper then...

This article examines recent and potential reforms in India's fiscal federal system. We summarize key federal institutions in India, including tax and expenditure assignments, and mechanisms for Center-state transfers. We discuss the institutional process by which reforms can and do take place,...

The 1994 reforms in China were remarkably successful in stabilizing the economy and raising revenues for the benefit of sustainable growth and permitting the central government to redistribute resources to poorer regions through an equalization framework. However, the rise of informal local...

We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a country consisting of a large number of heterogeneous regions, each comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighbouring district,...

This paper analyzes the regional impact of Indonesia's fuel policy. It discusses how the sharing of oil and gas revenue and taxes on oil and gas between the center and the regions affect sub-national fiscal position and what the regional incidence of the fuel subsidies is. It also analyzes the...