Tax competition is the strategic interaction of tax policy between sub-central governments (SCG) with the objective to attract and retain mobile tax bases. Tax competition rests on firms’ and households’ willingness and ability to shift the tax base – i.e. profits, capital, income,...

This paper describes the progress that has been made since 2006 in establishing statistical databases on tax autonomy and intergovernmental grants, aiming to better understand sub-central finance and intergovernmental fiscal relations. The paper is divided into two parts: a first part on taxing...

Tax sharing and intergovernmental grants are two sub-central funding arrangements that are often difficult to disentangle. The dividing line is not drawn uniformly across OECD countries or across time, and rules established in National Accounts, Revenue Statistics and others give incomplete...

Fiscal equalisation is a transfer of fiscal resources across jurisdictions with the aim of offsetting differences in revenue raising capacity or public service cost. Its principal objective is to allow sub-central governments to provide their citizens with similar sets of public services at a...

The world is recovering from the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. The recovery will probably be shallow and government deficits could remain very large over the next few years in a number of countries. The crisis has a negative impact not only on central...

This paper analyses trends and driving forces in the revenue composition of sub-central government (SCG). Between 1995 and 2005 the share of SCG in total government spending increased significantly from 31 to 33 percent while the SCG tax share remained stable at around 17 percent, increasing...

State and local governments in OECD countries have access to a variety of fiscal resources. Discretion over these resources varies considerably, and so does sub-central governments’ power to shape public service delivery. The design of fiscal autonomy affects sub-central government’s...

Intergovernmental fiscal frameworks usually reflect fundamental societal choices and history and are not foremost geared towards achieving economic policy objectives. Yet, like most institutional arrangements, fiscal relations affect the behaviour of firms, households and governments and thereby...

This paper provides an update of the indicators that measure the tax autonomy of sub-central governments in OECD countries. Over the last decade, tax autonomy at the state level increased, while it hardly changed at the local level. The OECD now has tax autonomy indicators for the years 1995,...

This paper contributes to the scarce literature on the macroeconomic effects of property taxes, in particular on the relationships between property taxes, house prices and the wider economy. The paper first estimates a fiscal reaction function which analysis the reaction of property tax revenues...