Effects Of Intergovernmental Transfers Research Articles

The effects of intergovernmental transfers on the local fiscal incentives of Brazilian municipalities

The objective of this work is to analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on the behavior of Brazilian municipal policymakers. This work uses the first three cutoffs of the transfer rules of the Municipal Participation Fund (FPM) and applies a regression discontinuity designs (RDD) to capture the effects that have impacted municipal budget rates from 2013 to 2016. The comportment hypothesis is that transfer gains can generate (a) perverse incentives, if the gains are earmarked for personnel and administrative expenses or if they decrease revenue, or (b) beneficial incentives, if the main gains are spent on education or health. The results found for the estimates of the data panel model suggest that an increase in exogenous revenue generates a significant increase only in spending on administrative and sports and leisure functions and that the possible channel for this increase in expenses should be aimed at increasing the number of employees with commissioned position. These results indicate that the transfers generate only perverse incentives. This article explores how local managers allocate their resources according to their additional budget. Unlike the other works, we look for the mayor's behavior in relation to spending on the employment of commissioned civil servants, which can lead to perverse incentives.

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

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.

Effect of Intergovernmental Transfers on Income and Poverty Rates: Evidence from the Philippines

Effect of Intergovernmental Transfers on Income and Poverty Rates: Evidence from the Philippines

The effect of intergovernmental transfers on infrastructure spending in Indonesia

This paper examines the impact of own-source revenues and intergovernmental grants on districts’ infrastructure spending in Indonesia. As capacities to generate local revenue are lacking, intergovernmental transfer (IGT) became the main source of local capital spending. This paper uses econometric models to examine the determinants of infrastructure spending. By looking at institutions and economic structure, the study argues for the increasing importance of IGT for local capital spending and shows that specific allocation grants are crucial to ensure local infrastructure spending. This paper calls for a specifically district-tailored IGT fund to accelerate infrastructure development and reduce further regional disparities across Indonesia. This paper contributes to the literature by looking at the effect of IGT on infrastructure spending in different types of regions, including districts in Java, districts with municipality status and metropolitan districts.

The Effects of Intergovernmental Transfers on Regional Fiscal Gap: Comparison before and after Abolition of Decentralization Revenue Sharing System in Korea

The Effects of Intergovernmental Transfers on Regional Fiscal Gap: Comparison before and after Abolition of Decentralization Revenue Sharing System in Korea

Depressing dependence? Transfers and economic growth in the German states, 1975–2005

ABSTRACTDepressing dependence? Transfers and economic growth in the German states, 1975–2005. Regional Studies. Most countries pay substantial intergovernmental transfers to poor regions with the aim of achieving regional convergence. Consequently, transfers should have a positive effect on economic growth. However, it is equally possible that transfers perpetuate underdevelopment. This paper studies empirically the effect of intergovernmental transfers on economic growth with a panel of West German states over the period 1975–2005. The findings suggest that transfers do not foster economic growth, presumably because the recipients use them to subsidize declining industries.

Substitution and Income Effects of Lump-Sum Income at the Aggregate Level: The Effective Budget Constraint of the Government and the Flypaper Effect

This paper analyzes the effect of a change in lump-sum (private) income on the tax and expenditure decisions of a government constrained by taxpayers’ behavioral responses to the tax policy. Changes in lump-sum income are generally characterized as pure income effects on taxpayers’ behavior, and considered by normative public finance theory as imposing no price effects on the economy. In this paper we show that pure income effects at the individual level can lead to three distinguishable effects at the aggregate level. The reason is that a change in lump-sum income affects taxpayers’ behavioral responses to taxation and the size of the tax bases, altering the marginal cost of tax collections. The optimal fiscal responses of a welfare maximizing government can be broken up into a “net substitution effect,” associated with a change in the marginal cost of public funds, a “private income effect,” associated with the increase in private consumption, and a “public income effect,” which is equivalent to the effect of intergovernmental transfers. As a consequence, the effects of lump-sum income and intergovernmental transfers on fiscal decisions are shown to be generally different, but consistent with empirical findings of the literature on the flypaper effect.

Are intergovernmental transfers in China equalizing?

Since 1994, China's central government has implemented a sequence of fiscal recentralization measures to increase its equalization capacity and reduce regional income disparities. However, the effect of intergovernmental transfers on equalization has been called into question by anecdotal evidence that seems to suggest that transfers from the center are not rule-based and are subject to heavy rent-seeking. Unlike past studies, which have focused on the equalization effects of total fiscal transfers from the center, this paper includes an examination of the equalization effects of different types of transfers because some transfers, which are inherently anti-equalizing, may mask the equalization effects of other types of transfers when they are lumped together to find the “average” effect. Using inequality measures, a decomposition of fiscal disparities, and dynamic panel data models, we find that China's intergovernmental transfer system that was established in 1994 does have some equalizing elements. To a large extent, these elements exist due to the mechanism designed to shrink the tax rebates that bear the legacy of the pre-1994 system; to a small extent, these elements exist due to the rule-based general-purpose transfer whose share in total transfers remains small but has increased since 2002. However, the equalization effects of the largest component of transfers, specific-purpose transfers, are anti-equalizing. They are typically not rule-based and thus subject to political influence. As a result, total transfers also exhibit significant anti-equalization effects.

The changing federal grant structure and its potential effects on state and local community development efforts

Changing political landscape often renews the call for dramatic changes to federal community and economic development grant-in-aid programs. The most dramatic proposal in recent years was President Bush’s 2006 call to consolidate federal assistance programs for communities into a new block grant known as the Strengthening America’s Communities Initiative (SACI). This conceptual study reviews key characteristics of intergovernmental transfers including grant types, features, changes in the intergovernmental fiscal environment, the fungibility/flypaper debate, and the symmetry/asymmetry response of governments to declining intergovernmental revenue. The effects of intergovernmental transfers on state and local governments are connected to differences in grant design features. Potential fallout from proposed or similar changes to grant structure is discussed using the SACI proposal as an example.