Many industrialized countries have recently implemented fiscal decentralization reforms assigning more competences and spending responsibilities to sub-national governments. In this paper we investigate what leads to the decentralization of different categories of public expenditure in 19...

Many countries have recently implemented fiscal decentralization reforms, assigning more functions and spending responsibilities to sub-national governments. In this paper we investigate the reasons behind the decentralization process of different categories of government expenditure (such as...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the influence of regional economic disparities on the fiscal decentralisation processes in twenty-one OECD countries over the period 1981 to 2005. We use novel and robust measures of fiscal decentralisation based on different degrees of autonomy over both...

We study the relationship between discretionary fiscal policy and macroeconomic stability in 21 OECD countries over the 1985–2012 period. The novelties of our contribution lie in the use of annual panel data, whereas most of the existing evidence is cross-sectional, and more importantly in the...

We study what affects the volatility of sub-central spending in 20 OECD countries. The evidence based on data from 1972 to 2007 shows that the volatility of intergovernmental grants from upper levels is positively associated with the volatility of local expenditure. On the contrary, the...

The budgeting process has been recently reformed in Italy (L. 196/2009) in order to improve control of budget and transparency in the provision of clear information on government fiscal policy. Indeed, the general government final expenditures often deviate significantly from the initial...