This paper show that there is a mismatch between the expenditure responsibilities that the City of Toronto is required to undertake and the revenue tools available to it. Toronto relies mainly on property taxes, user fees, and intergovernmental transfers to finance a wide range of services. In...

For the past fifteen years, Colombia has been engaged in a grand experiment in decentralization. Since 1986, subnational government spending has increased dramatically, as the regions have assumed greater control of health and education programs and other local services, and an increasing...

The article explores the content and consequences of the French constitutional reform of March 2003. Among the objectives of that reform, one is to preserve the tax autonomy for the local public sector; another is to ensure that the coming wave of devolution of competencies to decentralised...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the causal relationship between intergovernmental transfers and fiscal effort. Empirical evidence from Peruvian municipalities supports a negative relation. The substitution effect is decreasing on the level of municipalities’ expenditure and tends to...

Low corporate taxes can help attract new firms. This is the main mechanism underpinning the standard race-to-the-bottom view of tax competition. A recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by formalizing the argument that agglomeration forces can reduce firms' sensitivity to tax...

Low corporate taxes can help attract new firms. This is the main mechanism underpinning the standard 'race-to-the-bottom' view of tax competition. A recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by formalizing the argument that agglomeration forces can reduce firms' sensitivity to tax...

The paper discusses principles of local taxation such as accountability, benefit-tax link, non-distortion, regional equity, long-term efficiency, reliability and stability of tax bases, tax sharing as implicit insurance, and administrative simplicity. Not all of the criteria for local taxation...

Low corporate taxes can help attract new firms. This is the main mechanism underpinning the standard 'race-to-the-bottom'view of tax competition. A recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by formalizing the argument that agglomeration forces can reduce firms' sensitivity to tax...

In the first part of the paper we present and discuss the new legislation, on both local taxes and the Internal Stability Pact, enacted in Italy between September 2006 and December 2007. The most important aspects concern: the “thawing” of the income surtax levied by local government; the...

We study the impact of local taxation on the location and growth of firms. Our empiricalmethodology pairs establishments across jurisdictional boundaries to estimate the impact of taxation. Our approach improves on existing work as it corrects for unobserved establishment heterogeneity, for...