Background: China has five layers of government including the central government. Recently, some prefectural governments meet fiscal distress. Methods: We investigate the effects of urban and rural populations and area sizes on the expenditures of the prefecture-level local government by...

Der vorliegende Beitrag diskutiert die Frage, ob der Mikrostaat Liechtenstein ökonomische Nachteile aus seiner Kleinheit hinzunehmen hat. Am Beispiel des Fürstentums werden verschiedene Dimensionen der Dezentralität aufgezeigt. Kleinheit als dritte Dimension der Dezentralität wird dabei an...

This paper discusses the smallness of subsidiary jurisdictions as a third dimension of centrality, besides vertical centrality and fragmentation (horizontal centrality). A panel analysis concerning all 26 Swiss cantons (from 1990 to 2003) shows that public expenditure per-capita increases with...

This paper presents a model of nations where agents vote on the optimal level of public pending. Larger nations benefit from increasing returns in the provision of public goods, but bear the costs of greater cultural heterogeneity. This tradeoff induces agents' preferences over different...

German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments' vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical contributions that study political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public...