The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a fiscal common-pool problem in a Japanese local government. Especially, we focus on the relationship between council size and land development expenditure of local government using a dataset of 13,989 municipalities in Japan from FY2001 to FY2006. We...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the effects of municipal mergers in Japan’s local public expenditure. In order to evaluate the expenditure of municipal...

This paper considers the possible effects of broader-based local government, especially extended associations, in Japanese local public finance. In order to evaluate the expenditure of extended association, our new approach is to apply unique index called financial index classified by similar...

This paper considers the possible effects of broader-based local government, especially extended associations, in Japanese local public finance. We mainly analyze scale effects in public long-term care insurance expenditure, with our results indicating a U shaped expenditure structure. We also...