Studies of the diffusion of policies and institutions tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy or institution. This paper focuses directly on the abandonment of welfare policies under the...

This study analyzes the influence of multiple fragmentation and concentration variables on per capita expenditures for all counties in the United States from 1982 to 2002. Fragmentation and concentration variables are grouped along total, horizontal and vertical lines as identi ed in the...

This paper investigates the impact of inequality in the geographic distribution of fiscal resources on regional economic growth under fiscal decentralization policy in the context of China’s experience, using panel data for 28 provinces over the period 1987–2010. In the recent past, the...

Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched....

In 2018, nominal and real revenues growth rates of regions' and local budgets hit top indices since 2012. Simultaneously, curbing expenditure growth allowed for the first time in eleven years to ensure surplus of the consolidated budget in the amount of 0.5% of GDP. The number of Russian regions...

The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) dealt a fiscal blow to state governments by repealing the state death tax credit, a mechanism by which the Federal government effectively shared estate tax revenues with the states. Between 2001 and 2005, the repeal gradually...

Local governments in New England rely on state aid to finance the provision of essential public services. Yet in response to the recent and ongoing fiscal crisis, state governments across the region have cut local aid deeply, often by the same percentage in each community. This across-the-board...

This paper develops new measures of environmental costs and local revenue capacity as the basis for a new municipal aid formula in Massachusetts. On the cost side, unlike previous studies, we quantify the effects on local non‐school spending of characteristics related to uncontrollable costs....

This paper examines the distribution of unrestricted municipal aid in Massachusetts, which has been a major concern to civic leaders and elected officials of many communities, including Springfield. The paper develops a measure of the municipal fiscal gap indicating the relative need of...

This paper develops a framework that distributes reductions in state aid based on underlying local fiscal health. Under this framework, the state gives smaller aid cuts to communities that are in worse underlying fiscal health and receive less existing aid. This framework therefore provides a...