The Crowding in (out) Effect of Intergovernmental Transfers on Local Government Revenue Generation: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Literature on the fiscal incentives highlight the importance of how the design of intergovernmental transfer system has momentous implication on the local government’s behavior within devolved systems. The pragmatic results on the relationship between IGT and the incentive creation for the local government revenue generation are indecisive and differs across countries. Using a unique data set covering public finance and various socio economic data over the period 1990 to 2015 in Pakistan, this paper contribute to fiscal federalism literature by evaluating the fiscal incentives of unconditional (general purpose) formula defined and conditional (specific purpose) ad hoc based transfers. After endogenity adjustments, our empirical results shows that unconditional formula based intergovernmental transfers/grants improve the mobilization of local government revenues while the conditional, ad hoc based transfers, deteriorate the mobilization of local revenue. However, in Pakistan large part of transfers are unconditional so the results suggest that transfers from the federal government complement local own source revenues generation by encouraging local governments in Pakistan to collect more revenues.