What Drives Fiscal Decentralisation? Further Assessing the Role of Income*

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal decentralisation, focusing in particular on the impact of the level of income on the level of fiscal decentralisation. Various measures of fiscal decentralisation, several of them novel in this context, are employed in a cross‐country econometric model to test established and more recent hypotheses. Paying careful attention to variable measurement, model specification and sample coverage, the results suggest that there are significant relationships between fiscal decentralisation and income, as well as a range of other factors. However, these relationships may be more complicated than previously reported. For the entire large sample of countries, and for the OECD subsample, a positive relationship between income and decentralisation is found. This corroborates the results found in earlier studies. However, for the middle‐ and lower‐income nations, higher income is found to be associated with less decentralisation.     

Local Public Funding of Higher Education When Skilled Labor is Imperfectly Mobile

If higher education is publicly funded by local (sub-federal) jurisdictions, while skilled labor is heterogeneous in responding to wage differentials between jurisdictions, the spillovers that result give rise to a disparity between the centralized output-maximizing allocation of resources to higher education and decentralized equilibria. Generally, decentralization leads to under-provision, which can be offset by inter-jurisdictional subsidies based on gross migration flows. But the extent of the discrepancy depends on the local balance of political forces. Indeed, when the welfare of native-born emigrants is highly valued while new immigrants carry little political weight, over-provision in equilibrium is possible.     

An Inquiry into the Efficiency of Water Projects Under WRDA'86

The aim of this paper is to check whether intergovernmental transfers for water projects accepted in 1986 in the U.S. can be rationalized by a simple efficiency criterion. The empirical findings support this conjecture only partially.     

Fiscal Transfers and Fiscal Sustainability

We examine whether the U.S. and German state governments pursue sustainable fiscal policies taking into account fiscal transfers. Using panel data techniques we investigate whether the debt‐to‐GDP ratio had a positive influence on the primary surplus (Bohn model). We show that including/excluding fiscal transfers changes the results. If fiscal transfers are not included in the primary surplus, the test results do not indicate that the U.S. and German state governments pursued sustainable fiscal policies. Our results also suggest that fiscal transfers were positively related to debt. These findings indicate that intergovernmental transfers have implicitly subsidized debts.     

Mad about Austerity? The Effect of Fiscal Consolidation on Public Opinion

We explore the impact of fiscal austerity on three different dimensions of public opinion in 26 European Union countries (consumer confidence, attitude toward national authorities, and European institutions) on annual data between 1997 and 2017. Our main finding is that the independent effect of a tighter fiscal stance on public opinion is not large and, when present, seems to closely follow the impact of fiscal austerity on economic activity. Our results therefore are inconsistent with the view that fiscal austerity necessarily implies a negative effect on public opinion and a decline in popularity of national and European institutions.     

论财政安全问题的显性化及其原因

自由市场经济建立后的近200年闻,早期市场经济国家基本没有发生过财政危机,财政的安全问题似乎已经由市场经济制度解决了.但自上世纪80年代以来,财政的安全问题开始在世界范围内凸显.财政安全问题出现的根源在于政府职能的扩展,而经济全球化和财政机会主义则加剧了不安全因素,这一切又都是固有经济风险的市场经济制度这个大背景下的产物.     

公共财政框架下的财政风险防范机制研究

本以构建公共财政框架的必要性为背景，论述了公共财政框架下的财政风险，并提出了这种风险的研究对策。     

Borrowing to Finance Public Investment? The ‘Golden Rule of Public Finance’ Reconsidered in an Endogenous Growth Setting*

In this paper, we look for long‐run and short‐run effects of fiscal deficits on economic growth and welfare in a standard endogenous growth model. We show that, under very general hypotheses, the ‘golden rule of public finance’, which allows a government to run public‐investment‐oriented fiscal deficits, leads to a lower balanced‐growth path in the long run, and eventually in the short run, compared with balanced‐budget rules. Welfare effects are more difficult to assess, and depend on the form of the utility function. Our model shows that debt rules such as the golden rule may improve (if the consumption elasticity of substitution is ‘low’) or weaken (if the consumption elasticity of substitution is ‘high’) intertemporal welfare. Consequently, a balanced‐budget rule does not necessarily dominate debt rules from the point of view of welfare, while it does from the point of view of long‐run economic growth.     

对循环经济的再认识--从"3R"到"5R"

循环经济的产生推动了理论界对人类可持续发展的研究。循环经济即节约经济、持久经济、相伴经济意义上的生态经济。循环经济的操作原则是5R原则，即减量化原则、再使用原则、再循环原则、资源的再生性原则、资源的替代原则。     

Inflation and inequality

Cross-country evidence on inflation and income inequality suggests that they are positively related. This article explores the hypothesis that this correlation is the outcome of a distributional conflict underlying the determination of government policies. A political economy model is presented in which equilibrium inflation is positively related to the degree of inequality in income due to the relative vulnerability to inflation of low income households.