Sustainable and inclusive growth in emerging Asian economies requires continued high levels of public sector investment in areas such as infrastructure, education, health, and social services. These responsibilities, especially with regard to infrastructure investment, need to be devolved...

Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched....

Since 1975, Viet Nam has gradually decentralized more fiscal responsibilities to local authorities. This study has two objectives: (i) to take stock of the current institutional framework for intergovernmental fiscal relations in Viet Nam, and (ii) to empirically assess the debt sustainability...

We show that imposition of a state-level environmental tax in a federation crowds out preexisting federal taxes. We explain how this vertical fiscal externality can lead unilateral state-level environmental policy to generate a welfare gain in the implementing state, at the expense of other...

We assume like Bergstrom (1989) and Dijkstra (2007) that each child's utility is treated as a normal good in the altruistic head's utility function, and show that if utility functions lead to Almost Transferable Utility children can manipulate the tradeoff between their own utility and the...

Municipalities in fiscal distress may seek to adjust debts under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code either because they are truly destitute or because they lack the political will to adopt affordable tax increases. Local officials of municipalities that enter bankruptcy proceedings nevertheless...

This paper provides an empirical test of a principal tenet of fiscal federalism: that spending discretion, when granted to localities, leads to public-sector heterogeneity, with public-good levels adjusting to suit local demands. The test is based on a simple model of partial fiscal...

This paper deals with interbudgetary relations and subnational finances in the Russian Federation. The authors focus on the issue of subnational budgets during the financial crisis of 2008. They analyze financial aid from the federal budget to regional authorities

In many countries occur problems from unfunded mandates related to a shift of a function by an upper tier of government to lower rank governments without providing the lower one with financial means to perform these functions. The authors define the unfunded mandates and clarify how they relate...