The present paper attempts at a comparative evaluation of two Indian cities, Delhi and Bangalore, in the performance of implementing property tax reforms through unit area method of valuation and self-assessment schemes. Delhi is a city where the results of implementation of these reforms were...

This paper examines the hard-to-tax problem as it relates to the operation of the retail sales tax in general and particularly in the context of an increasingly global economy, with freer trade and factor mobility and heightened horizontal tax and market competition. The perspective of...

During the past three decades, a large number of countries have introduced reforms to decentralize public decision making. Such reforms have proved controversial. Critics of these reforms argue that decentralized provision of infrastructure enhances vulnerability to corruption. Proponents of...

Local governments often set up inter-municipal consortia to provide public services jointly, rather than individually. The main benefits of joint provision include the potential for improved cost-effectiveness arising from gains from economies of scale and the internalisation of costs and/or...

In this paper we attempt to take a fresh look at the classical question of the determinants of tax effort. Our goal is to better understand the fundamental economic logic of the different approaches that have been used in the previous literature, consider alternative measurements which may...

There are by now vast academic literatures on both tax compliance and the underground economy. These literatures provide estimates of the overall degrees of non-compliance and shadow (or hidden) activity as well as numerous insights into their causes and consequences. However, we believe it is...

This paper concerns the use of presumptive taxation methods in taxing the hard to tax, which is a subset of presumptive taxation more generally. Since other papers are concerned with the concept of the “hard to tax”, I will not dwell on it, beyond noting that it is rooted in the...

Local income data is an important economic indicator, widely used in a broad range of studies related to regional convergence, urban economics, fiscal federalism, housing and spatial analysis. Despite its importance, there is a lack of official data on local incomes and, most importantly, on...

This paper focuses on the evolving pattern of fiscal decentralization and its impact on the growth of per capita GDP of the districts in Nepal. The dependent variable is the growth of the per capita district agricultural GDP, which is, used as a proxy for the annual growth of per capita district...

This chapter provides an overview of the key issues in public economics arising from the process of territorial decentralisation that has taken place in Spain since the restoration of democracy and the Constitution of 1978, and which resulted in the emergence of the “Autonomic State”. The...