This paper describes briefly the different forms of equalization, principally focusing on the distinction between revenue equalization versus cost equalization. In addition, some international country case studies from Australia, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland are presented. Based on these...

The following paper deals with the fiscal federalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Besides a detailed description of the development of the fiscal federalism in BiH since the Dayton peace process, the main focus of this paper is to illustrate how the public finance system in BiH is designed...

Should a subset of member states of a federation be allowed to form a sub-union on some policy issue? When centralization is not politically feasible, allowing an enhanced cooperation agreement among a subset of countries permits the latter to gain benefits which would otherwise be lost....

Previous theoretical and empirical research has shown that policymakers have an incentive to centralize government activities in order to weaken the com-petitive pressure of fiscal federalism. We propose and test a positive model of fiscal federalism in which centralization is less likely to...

The paper examines the effects of demographic change on federal, state and local government expenditures in Germany. Public spending is decomposed into almost 30 categories (functions) and simple estimates of age cost profiles are derived. Using population forecasts and assuming timeinvariant...

The paper examines the effects of demographic change on federal, state and local governments in Germany with a focus on the expenditure side to answer the question, whether demographic change will induce vertical fiscal expenditure imbalances. We present estimates of the impact of demographic...