Efficient migration and redistribution

It has often been noted that the brain drain may be abetted by highly progressive tax systems in the regions which are likely sources for emigration by those with the most income-earning potential. This paper presents the case in favour of such policies. The underlying assumption here is that there are productivity differences between regions, and that emigration of the most skilled workers from less productive regions increases the overall value of national output. The problem lies in sharing these gains with the less-skilled workers left behind in the low-productivity region. If national governments can transfer income among regions, but if the transfers cannot be targeted to particular individuals, then there is a trade-off between equity and efficiency. Generous transfers redistribute the gains, but tend to impede efficient migration, since prospective migrants will only emigrate if their earnings, net of all fiscal transfers, and net of migration costs, are higher in the destination region. Greater tax progressivity in the source region helps relax a constraint, and make the trade-off less difficult.     

An African Growth Trap: Production Technology and the Time-Consistency of Agricultural Taxation, R&D and Investment

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods, when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? The authors posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government sets tax and R&D levels while investors respond with production. Equilibrium policy and growth rates depend on the initial cost structure. It is found that in many (but not all) African countries, low tax/high investment regimes would be time‐inconsistent, primarily because production technology requires relatively large sunk costs. For pro‐growth policies to become sustainable, new political commitment mechanisms or new production techniques would be needed.     

The Efficiency Consequences of Local Revenue Equalization: Tax Competition and Tax Distortions

This paper shows how a popular system of federal revenue equalization grants can limit tax competition among subnational governments, correct fiscal externalities, and increase government spending. Remarkably, an equalization grant can implement efficient policy choices by regional governments, even in the presence of differences in regional tax capacity, tastes for public spending, and population. If aggregate tax bases are elastic, however, equalization leads to excessive taxation. Efficiency can be achieved by a modified formula that equalizes a fraction of local revenue deficiencies equal to the fraction of taxes that are shifted backward to factor suppliers.     

Transfers and Bailouts: Institutions for Enforcing Local Fiscal Discipline

The growing importance of local and provincial governments as providers of public services and the importance of those services for the overall performance of the national economy has led to a careful re-examination of how public resources are allocated by decentralized governments. While the Tiebout model promises efficient local resource allocations, the conditions necessary for such outcomes—many local governments, fully informed and costlessly mobile households, no spillovers, residential head taxes—are rarely met in practice. Lacking a sufficient number of competitive local governments, however, other institutional safeguards must be found. Four such institutions are identified here. First, a stable central government managed by nationally elected political parties or presidents capable of making (second-best) efficient interpersonal redistributions of income while at the same time denying inefficient intergovernmental transfers and /or access to non-resident taxation. Second, a mature banking system and fully integrated national capital markets to minimize the economic consequences of a single government's failure to repay its local debts. Third, informed and sophisticated municipal bond and local land markets capable of evaluating local services and finances so as to shift back onto local residents the full economic consequences of inefficient local government fiscal choices. Fourth, a politically independent judiciary capable of enforcing constitutional rules for spending and tax assignment, local debt repayment, and balanced local budgets. Efficient central governments and efficient land and capital markets are seen here as necessary institutional pre-conditions for an efficient local public sector.     

Federal transfers, environmental policy and economic growth

We study the effects of commonly used cross-country transfer programs on uncoordinated national environmental policies, economic growth and natural resources in a federal economy. Natural resources are a federation-wide public good. In each member country, production degrades the environment, but clean-up policy can improve it. Clean-up policy is financed by taxes on polluting firms’ output and cross-country redistributive transfers. We solve for a symmetric Nash equilibrium among national governments. Transfer policies that lead to higher pollution taxes make existence harder, and are harmful not only to growth but also to the environment. The best way to improve environmental quality is to implement a taxation system that stimulates growth and broadens tax bases to finance national clean-up policies.     

Aggressive oil extraction and precautionary saving: Coping with volatility

The effects of stochastic oil demand on optimal oil extraction paths and tax, spending and government debt policies are analyzed when the oil demand schedule is linear and preferences quadratic. Without prudence, optimal oil extraction is governed by the Hotelling rule and optimal budgetary policies by the tax and consumption smoothing principle. Volatile oil demand brings forward oil extraction and induces a bigger government surplus. With prudence, the government depletes oil reserves even more aggressively and engages in additional precautionary saving financed by postponing spending and bringing taxes forward, especially if it has substantial monopoly power on the oil market, gives high priority to the public spending target, is very prudent, and future oil demand has high variance. Uncertain economic prospects induce even higher precautionary saving and, if non-oil revenue shocks and oil revenue shocks are positively correlated, even more aggressive oil extraction. In contrast, prudent governments deliberately underestimate oil reserves which induce less aggressive oil depletion and less government saving, but less so if uncertainty about reserves and oil demand are positively correlated.     

The importance of government commitment in attracting firms: A dynamic analysis of tax competition in an agglomeration economy

Agglomeration tendencies of industrial firms significantly affect the nature of tax competition. This paper analyzes tax competition between two countries over an infinite time horizon in an economy with trade costs and internationally mobile industrial firms. Most of the previous studies on tax competition in the ‘new economic geography’ framework employ static models. In this study, two governments dynamically compete with each other to attract firms through their choices of taxes and subsidies. It is shown that the commitment of the governments to their policies is crucial in determining the distribution of firms in the long run. Specifically, if governments find each others׳ tax policies credible, then one country will attract all the firms when trade costs are low enough to make agglomeration forces dominant. If policies are not credible, both countries may attract an equal share of firms even when trade costs are low, as the lack of commitment by governments acts as a dispersion force.     

Corruption in space: A closer look at the world's subnations

Corruption levels differ not only between but also within countries. In this paper we analyze spatial interdependencies in corruption levels for a large sample of 1232 subnational regions from 81 countries. Based on a spatial autoregressive model, which controls for country-fixed effects and corrects for spatial autocorrelation in the error term, we find that a subnational region's corruption level is positively correlated with neighboring subnational regions' corruption levels. Extending the core model and allowing for heterogeneous spatial effects, we find that most spillovers among subnational regions occur within national borders. Moreover, in particular high income subnational regions and subnational regions with relative low corruption levels tend to spill in space. This is due to their high degree of connectivity in terms of economic, sociocultural and political exchange with other subnational regions. Our estimation results underline the importance to consider not only a subnational region's own characteristics, but also spatial interdependencies when implementing efficient anti-corruption policies at the local level.     

The effects of economic and political integration on fiscal decentralization: evidence from OECD countries

Abstract .  This paper examines the impact of economic and political integration on the vertical government structure. It argues that, by increasing the market size and the benefits of decentralized provision of public goods, integration triggered the recent process of decentralization in OECD countries. A panel analysis relates the degree of fiscal decentralization to economic and European integration, controlling for interregional heterogeneity, economies of scale, and institutions. The results mostly support a decentralizing effect of economic integration in general and of European integration in particular for heterogeneous EU countries, whereas participation of subnational governments in national decision-making is associated with more centralization.     

Old‐age Social Security versus Forward Intergenerational Public Goods Provision

This paper introduces an overlapping‐generations model with earnings heterogeneity and borrowing constraints. The labour income tax and the allocation of tax revenue between social security and forward intergenerational public goods are determined in a bidimensional majoritarian voting game played by successive generations. The political equilibrium is characterized by an ends‐against‐the‐middle equilibrium where low‐income and high‐income individuals form a coalition in favour of a lower tax rate and less social security while middle‐income individuals favour a higher tax rate and greater social security. Government spending then shifts from social security to public goods provision if higher wage inequality is associated with a borrowing constraint and a high elasticity of marginal utility of youth consumption.     

Raising taxes through equalization

Abstract.  A simple theory suggests that a common form of federal horizontal equalization grants should cause subnational governments to levy higher tax rates, distorting local tax bases and so increasing federal transfers. To test this, I examine Canadian provincial tax policies in the 1972–2002 period. Consistent with the theory, provinces respond to expansions of equalization transfers by increasing their own tax rates. I estimate that on average tax rates in grant-receiving provinces were substantially and significantly higher as a consequence of the transfer formula. JEL classification: H21     

Governments under influence: Country interactions in discretionary fiscal policy

We investigate the interactions between countries, and their effect on the discretionary (i.e. the cyclically-adjusted and interest-adjusted) components of national fiscal policies, observing and investigating the parts of public spending and tax receipts over which governments retain full discretion. Our sample includes 18 OECD countries for the period 1974–2008. First, we construct a measure of a discretionary fiscal policy from the residual component in a VAR model. We then compute this measure for the full sample. Using these data, we next run estimations of the discretionary fiscal policy interactions among the countries in the sample. Our results show that public decisions are affected by interactions between neighbor countries, neighborhood being defined by economic leadership as well as geography. We found evidence of opportunistic behavior by OECD country governments in relation to discretionary public spending. Finally, our estimation results reveal the crucial leadership role played by the USA in relation to discretionary fiscal policy decisions in Europe.     

Political Economy of Conditional Aid in a Federal Economy

This paper employs a political economy approach to model the joint determination of national and subnational sectoral protection in an open federal economy. Political interactions between special interest groups and policymakers as well as economic interrelationships between federal and state government policies are analyzed. The model is applied to study the effects of conditional financial assistance on policy‐making in the aid‐receiving federal economy. We find that policy‐based financial assistance to the federal government tends to reduce the extent of distortions resulting from the federal government policy. However, if federal and state government policies are strategic substitutes, state government induced policy distortions would increase, thereby detracting from the effectiveness of conditionality in reducing overall policy distortions in the recipient economy.     

Public debt dynamics with tax revenue constraints

We develop a dynamic model of public debt under the assumption that it is problematic for governments to implement fast increases of tax revenues, as new taxes require costly infrastructure and expertise that can be built only over time. In this environment, the standard condition requiring economic growth greater than interest costs is not sufficient to guarantee financial stability. Debt might become unstable if the gap between these two indicators falls below a given threshold. Our empirical analysis based on historical public finance data for the US provides strong support for the model. This study conveys a cautionary warning, because the debt of relatively safe borrowers may suddenly become unstable for instance because of a substantial deceleration in the growth of nominal income. These issues can be particularly relevant for those countries that do not have a modern and efficient tax collection system.     

Tax buoyancy in OECD countries: New empirical evidence

A renewed interest in the link between business cycle and tax revenues has recently emerged, especially during economic crises. In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis on 35 OECD countries over the period 1995–2016 to estimate both short-run and long-run tax buoyancies, taking into account the macroeconomic framework, changes in governments’ tax policies, budgetary and political variables possibly affecting how taxes react to GDP fluctuations. By adopting the dynamic common correlated effects estimator, we find that both short- and long-run tax responses are lower than those reported in previous cross-country studies. We suggest that this slightly lower than expected reaction of tax revenue can be interpreted as a reduced power of both automatic stabilization in the short-run and fiscal sustainability in the long-run. Results are robust to possible endogeneity issues between tax revenues and business cycles.     

Optimal democratic mechanisms for taxation and public good provision

We study the interdependence of optimal tax and expenditure policies. An optimal policy requires that information on preferences is made available. We first study this problem from a general mechanism design perspective and show that efficiency is possible only if the individuals who decide on public good provision face an own incentive scheme that differs from the tax system. We then study democratic mechanisms with the property that tax payers vote over public goods. Under such a mechanism, efficiency cannot be reached and welfare from public good provision declines as the inequality between rich and poor individuals increases.     

BUREAUCRACY AND TIME CONSISTENCY*

We construct a model that takes seriously the role of bureaucracy in the characterization of time-consistent policies. We argue that if the possibilities for governments to reduce the size of bureaucracy are limited, bureaucracy can be used as a means for influencing future governments. We show that the political process has implications for the size and growth of bureaucracy. Parties in power may hire bureaucrats of the opposite political color. This is a part of the time-consistent policy. Our model also gives an explanation for the growth of bureaucracy. This is a consequence of the time-consistent policies, i.e. policies that partially tie the hands of future governments. We also show that if public sector production is inefficient, the public sector will be too large in the long run. In the short run it may be too small.     

构建以财产税为主体的地方税体系研究

随着我国政治经济体制改革的深入,我国也开始了财政分权的改革历程,并期望以此来促进公共产品供给效率,解决基层政府的财政困难。财政分权的核心支撑因素就是地方应拥有可自主支配的地方税,且财产税和地方税主体税种的选择标准有很高的吻合度。另外,研究还发现:销售税和个人所得税作为地方税主体税种的合理性值得怀疑。在地方主体税种的构建中,综合国外成功经验并本着地方税收原则,建议把我国现行的房地产税收体系改革、整合为新的财产税,并以此作为我国地方税收入的主要来源。     

Taxation and political business cycles in EU economies

This paper examines whether incumbent national governments of 11 member states of the European Union manipulated the tax policy instruments at their disposal in order to create national political business cycles, opportunistic or partisan. The empirical evidence, based on data concerning the 1965 to 1997 period, does not support this hypothesis. Rather, it appears that governments have pursued stabilization policies.     

The regionalization of indian politics and its implications for economic reform

Is political decentralization an impetus for economic liberalism, or are state and local governments impediments to a rigorous reform process? This article describes India's federal system, the growth of regional parties and governments, the changing balance of power between India's state and central governments, and the deterioration of state administrations, then assesses the economic reform and human resource policies of the states. The factors which slow the pace of reforms (politically unstable governments, fiscal populism, organized local interests, patronage and rents for party and government officials) and those that push for reforms (fiscal deficits, the need for investments in infrastructures, and inter-state competition for private investment) are analyzed.