国有企业改革能否引起财政激励效应——以西部某省为例

国有企业改革对我国建立社会主义市场经济体制至关重要。本文以第二代财政分权理论的研究为基础,以西部某省的24个行业为样本,分析研究了地方政府改革国有企业的财政动机。结果表明,近年来样本省的国企"做大做强"改革路线具有明显的财政激励效应,这种效应使得地方政府有动机将国有企业引上一条资本规模不断扩大、人员冗余和退出机制不完善的道路。     

Fiscal decentralization and tax collection: evidence from the rural property tax in Brazil

The present paper investigates whether the decentralization of the rural land property tax (ITR) in Brazil increases the aggregate volume of tax collection from this source. We apply a difference-in-differences strategy where treatment is defined as the switch from a federal administration to the decentral management of the ITR by a municipality. The panel data from 2002 to 2017 show that decentralization leads to an average increase in overall ITR collection by about 42% in the first year, which rises to 109% in the 8th year. Our results are robust to balancing with entropy weights, the anticipation of treatment as well as the multi-period staggered timing of the ITR decentralization. Due to these peculiarities of our research design, we show that the increase in ITR collection is related to a more efficient tax management, i.e., a rigorous implementation and charge of tax duties.     

Fiscal federalism in Russia: a critique of the OECD proposals

The OECD proposes to kill two birds with one stone in Russiaby simultaneously improving fiscal federalism, and using thefinancial reform process to press for full market liberalisation.This paper scrutinises the initiative and finds it wanting becausethe consensus reforms advocated conflate the re-centralisationof fiscal authority with optimal ownership, property rightsand effective market building, perpetuating the illusion thatthere are no bad market systems. The G-7 and Putin must do better.Yeltsin's mis-privatisation and mis-liberalisation, which spawnedrent seeking, asset stripping, asset seizing and a disregardfor profit maximising from current operations, have proved tobe path dependent and need to be rectified. Putin's increasinglyvisible efforts to rein private property rights must also betaken into account in designing on optimal fiscal federalistregime.     

Group Welfare and the Formation of a Common Labor Market: Some Global Results

Consider a collection of isolated or autarkic regions. The original residents or natives of each region are by assumption a group with a welfare function defined over group members' consumption. Now suppose the regions form a common labor market and a federal government, and one type from each group can freely migrate to other regions. Under what circumstances is this change even potentially beneficial to all groups? We derive a necessary and sufficient condition that depends only on the exogenous parameters of our model. Earlier treatments of these issues focus on relationships among endogenous variables. Our condition underlies those relationships. We also show that there is nothing pathological about the conditions under which federalism must make some or all groups worse off. When it is possible to make all groups better off, we show that the change can be supported by Wildasin's (1991) corrected Nash equilibrium in redistributive transfers.     

财政联邦制、非正式财政与政府债务——对中国转型经济的规范分析

财政联邦制的一个潜在消极后果是,地方政府竞相从事高风险投资项目等脱离中央监督的非正式财政活动,从而引起预算软约束,并导致政府债务的积累。如果地方政府都这么做,就会形成“太多而不能惩罚”的局面。文章还探讨了如何通过改变政府行为导向,改善政府治理来避免这类问题的可能性。     

Determinants of sub-sovereign bond yield spreads – The role of fiscal fundamentals and federal bailout expectations

This paper investigates how bailout expectations affect the extent to which yield spreads for bonds issued by sub-sovereign entities within fiscal federations price in fundamentals related to default risk. The question is analysed both across and within federations using a novel dataset for sub-sovereign governments that includes Australian states, Canadian provinces, Swiss cantons, German Länder, US states, Spanish communities, and Indian states. The paper finds that sub-sovereign debt and deficit levels relative to GDP are important drivers of sub-sovereign spreads. However, the weight assigned by financial markets to fundamentals when pricing sub-sovereign bonds is reduced when the institutional set-up of the federation allows for bailouts. Moreover, within federations, the market’s expectation of a federal bailout and the capacity of the federal government to provide support to the weaker members of the federation similarly affect the extent to which fundamental factors are priced into spreads. The paper shows that the positive link between debt and risk premia tends to break down when sub-sovereign government debt rises above certain thresholds. This could reflect the market’s expectation of a federal bailout as fundamentals deteriorate. Additionally, larger sub-sovereign entities tend to pay higher premia as fundamentals worsen which could be linked to the limited capacity of the federal government to provide support as the size of the expected bailout increases. A pattern of rising risk premia as fundamentals worsen is also found for sub-sovereign entities when the central government faces borrowing constraints.     

Why are tax revenues of local governments so low?

Using a unique data set on federal grants and tax revenues of more than 5000 Brazilian cities, we find that the federal government imposes an implicit tax of almost 10% on city governments’ tax revenues: for every dollar that a city collects from its residents, the federal government withdraws grants worth 9 cents from the city. Our findings suggest that local government tax revenues are low not because federal grants crowd out tax revenues, but because tax revenues crowd out federal grants.     

The future of fiscal federalism

For at least three decades after World War II, there was little interest in fiscal decentralization. Because of the large growth in public spending that took place during that period, a growth that was mainly focused at the central government level, this was a period characterized by fiscal centralization in most countries. Starting in the late 1970s, a reaction against large governments started. This reaction followed two distinct tracks: privatization and fiscal decentralization. The paper argues that these two tracks were almost two sides of the same coin and were largely mutually exclusive. They reflected similar concerns and objectives. In more recent decades, globalization has been creating global public goods or public “bads” and international activities that would require public attention or the action of a “world government”. Because no such government exists, its role is progressively being delegated to proxies, in the form of international organizations, agreements, treaties, accords and other forms of international understandings. The paper concludes that this development is likely to weaken over time the role of central governments. It also speculates that it may strengthen the importance of municipalities.     

Devolution and federalism in England

This paper is concerned with current moves toward sub-national devolution in England and the prospects for a federal government system within the United Kingdom as a whole. The initial focus of the paper is upon the contested nature and governance of regions in England. Current steps toward devolution to such regions are considered through a critical lens, before moving to a wider discussion of the theory and practice of federalism and of whether England could be part of a federal system of UK government. It is concluded that the devolution agenda may proceed in a more serious and consistent manner than at present but there are severe barriers to federalism, including major constitutional constraints, the lack of a written constitution, significant asymmetry between different nations of the UK, the lack of clarity about the definition of sub-national English regions and the lack of political will. These all render a true UK federal state impossible to envisage.     

Grants structure in an intergovernmental fiscal game

Abstract. Systems of intergovernmental grants change over time. We explain this observation in terms of political and economic shocks in a noncooperative game between federal and provincial governments. The effects on the equilibrium grants structure arising from political disagreement, fiscal burden, increased revenue instability, and federalistic behaviour are examined. Our results provide a new theoretical perspective on grants. We show that the role of matching grants may be to influence the pattern of social spending by provincial or state governments, while conditional lump-sum grants are used simultaneously to determine the composition of the tax burden across the levels of government. Received: January 2001 / accepted: April 2002 We are grateful for the helpful comments received from Richard Bird, Amihai Glazer, and two anonymous referees.