Local governments rely heavily on sales tax revenue. We use national bankruptcies of big-box retail chains to study sudden plausibly exogenous revenue shortfalls. Treated localities respond by reducing spending on law enforcement and administrative services. We further study how cities with...

Public sector activities are often neglected in economic approaches to analyze the driving forces of urban growth and changes in urban hierarchies. One crucial aspect of public sector activities is the institutional status of cities as regional capital. The paper is reporting on a quasi natural...

The essay focuses on local development and governance. It examines the questions posed by the evolution of industrial districts and the new policy for local development, the so-called Instruments for Local Development. The analysis highlights a complex and contradictory relationship between the...

Growth and jobs are top concerns for policy makers confronting difficult economic conditions in many OECD countries. Sub-national governments are important contributors to national growth, but in many cases their economies are struggling as well. Faced with tight fiscal conditions, all levels of...

The existence of an economic dividend - in terms of regional disparities -of the global devolutionary trend registered over the past three decades is still ambiguous both on theoretical and empirical grounds and it is likely to be casespecific. With respect to the Italian case it has been argued...

Fiscal decentralization has been a fundamental aspect of China's transition to a market economy; and the country has made substantial efforts to break down its highly centralized fiscal management system with various forms of fiscal contracting systems (1978-1993) and later a tax sharing system...

Over 330 million people live in India’s 5,165 cities, and 35 cities have a population of over a million each. Three (Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata) of the 10 largest metropolises in the world are in India. Over two-thirds of India’s GDP originates in urban agglomerations in the country....

This paper sheds light on the heavy financial burden on peasants in China's fiscal decentralization system. Using a political economy framework, this paper explores the tax-farming nature of China's fiscally decentralized system and examines why the system incurs a particularly heavy financial...

The application of E-government initiative in Jordan had widely spread milestones in terms of achievement, these achievements has changed the means of communication between the government different ministries and directories through websites. This research studied the level of E-government...