The wage paid to politicians affects both the choice of citizens to run for an elective office and the performance of those who are appointed. First, if skilled individuals shy away from politics because of higher opportunities in the private sector, an increase in politicians' pay may change...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes fiscal devolution in Belgium. It examines long-term fiscal strategies for meeting the fiscal burden of population aging. The paper presents estimates of the fiscal costs of population aging in Belgium, and discusses their sensitivity to underlying assumptions....

One of the measure of the effectiveness of fiscal rules is their level of compliance, especially when sub-national fiscal rules are considered. However, the compliance level can be a misleading proxy for the impact of the rules, given the possibilities that fiscal rules trigger window dressing...

Rapidly rising local government debt in Japan presents a nontrivial addition to the central government debt. The planned replacement of the approval system for local government bor- rowing by a `consultation system´ in FY 2006 does not remove the implicit central govern- ment guarantee for...

There is little evidence of regional, let alone worldwide, trends in local finances, although trends within particular countries certainly exist. Given the path-dependent and context-specific nature of country experiences, one must be very careful both in categorizing the local finance systems...