The paper considers territorial models of local self governance that had emerged in Russian regions prior to the reform and their impact on various aspects of municipal establishments' activities. The authors evaluate the regional law in the area of local self governance and interbudgetary...

Organizational and financial issues related to the governance of municipalities were examined in this work with the aim to analyze regional peculiarities of municipal reform during transition period. Analysis was conducted with the help of budget statistics for the first half of 2006 and...

Within the framework of this study, we have been monitoring the development of municipal reform from the moment of the enactment of Federal Law No. 131-FZ, “On general principles of the organization of local self-government in the Russian Federation,” until mid-year 2006. This paper...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether expenditure decentralization has contributed to weakening fiscal performance in Europe. Using a panel of EU15 countries for the period 1995-2011, we estimate three econometric models and ask the following questions: (1) does the form of spending...

The paper discusses the reasons and possible resolutions of the contradictions in the Hungarian local government system, and proposes methods to resolve them. The nature of the Hungarian system cannot be described by classical normative theories of fiscal federalism. The operation of Hungarian...

Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims (Sept. 29, 2005) contends that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has been misconstrued as mandating birthright citizenship. Rather, the clause was a...

This paper analyzes the lack of civic engagement in local government decision-making and the problems that result from it. I consider one explanation as viewed through public choice theory: dominant special interest groups capture local governments for their own private interests. Thus, average...

In the past year, local governments have made a foray into the hotly debated arena of immigration law and policy by adopting laws to address illegal immigration in their respective jurisdictions. Courts have struck down many of these laws on the grounds that they are preempted pursuant to a...

This section analyzes the main new trends that became visible in the North Caucasus during the past year. Bearing in mind the specific features of this region of the Russian Federation, it is important that our analyst should not be confined to examining only the changes that occurred in the...

We present a novel account of China's recent move to decentralize legislation through amending the Law on Legislation (LL). Conventional wisdom pervading both Chinese political discourse and social scientific scholarship on China portrays law as incompatible with experimentation and as only...