Local Spending Research Articles

Factors influencing customer's loyalty towards ride-hailing taxi services – A case study of Vietnam

Abstract With the emergence of new transport technologies, ride-hailing services have become increasingly popular around the world in recent years. Particularly in developing countries where public transport (PT) systems are normally poor due to the lack of investment, these services have become more prevalent as they are considered as a form of PT mode. Thus, understanding the loyalty intention of ride-hailing passengers is important as it is seen to be a prime determinant of long-term financial performance. Additionally, the operation of these services can increase urban mobility, which can lead to an increase in local spending and government revenue. The aim of this study is to understand better the complexities of factors influencing ride-hailing passenger satisfaction and loyalty intention. The data collected by surveying 559 ride-hailing passengers in Vietnam was analysed using a Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) approach. The findings show that three factors including perceived benefits of the booking app, perceived sales promotion and perceived service quality have direct influences on passenger satisfaction and loyalty in which perceived service quality is more important than the other factors. Insight into the perceptions of passengers provides ride-hailing firms and even their competitors (traditional taxi services) with managerial implications aiming to maintain and increase patronage.

Foreign Policy as Pork-barrel Spending: Incentives for Legislator Credit Claiming on Foreign Aid

Foreign policy often creates geographically concentrated domestic benefits. A prominent example is the tying of development aid to purchases from the donor country. This feature of aid highlights the utility in examining foreign policy as an instance of pork-barrel politics. Considering tied aid in terms of legislators’ incentives to provide constituent benefits, we argue that people will support an increase in foreign aid spending more when it would promote local economic activity, while opposing aid cuts more when reduced local economic output would result. Crucially, we also expect that people will support their state’s US senator more when informed that the senator attempted to secure (or retain) locally beneficial funds. We find support for our expectations in a novel survey experiment of US citizens. Our results suggest that legislators’ electoral incentives, and consequential local spending, can help explain the adoption of foreign policies despite national-level public disapproval.

Local David Versus Global Goliath: Populist Parties and the Decline of Progressive Politics in Italy

This paper analyzes the role of local spending, particularly on social welfare, and local inequality as factors in the Italian political crisis following the adoption in 2011 of more radical national austerity measures. We employ two different methods. First, we develop an original database of municipal budgets. There we show that even the lowest level of social welfare spending, that offered by Italian municipalities, though also hit by austerity, was still able to moderate this national shock. We test three operationalizations of local spending: aggregate current expenditures, aggregate current expenditures on social services, and current expenditures disaggregated by function. We show that municipal current expenditures, particularly on social spending, significantly affected the post-2011 share of votes for the progressive coalition. The results also show that social spending, especially on education, significantly moderated the combined effect of national austerity and the economic crisis on voting for populist radical right parties, while no significant results appeared for populist parties in general. Local inequality appears to significantly enhance vote shares of populist radical right parties and populist parties in general. We caution that, although significant, the effect is not strong: that local policy and economic conditions can moderate national shocks but cannot reverse them. The second analysis relies on survey data to ascertain the individual-level mechanisms behind the role of local welfare. The paper argues that local economic inputs influence voters’ position on non-economic issues. Our results, however, do not identify any significant individual-level channel of transmission, be it cultural or economic.

Local territorial reform and regional spending efficiency

ABSTRACT We study the effect of a Portuguese structural reform, which reduced the number of parishes, on municipality spending efficiency between 2011 and 2016. We build a composite output indicator and use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute efficiency scores. Then, we use a second-stage regression to evaluate the effect of the reform on municipal efficiency after controlling for socio-demographic, political and economic factors. Overall, we find efficiency gains in approximately 10% of municipalities. In some regions (e.g., Alentejo and Centro), more than 50% of the municipalities improved efficiency. The second-stage results show that the structural reform did not improve local spending efficiency in Mainland Portugal, particularly in the Centro, Lisbon and Vale do Tejo regions.

Factors influencing the extent of local public spending through contracting-out and intermunicipal contracting in New York: focusing on institutional constraints, histories, and fiscal capacity

ABSTRACTThis research considered levels of public service spending according to the alternative service arrangements, and examined how the property tax cap as an external constraint, local histories, and local fiscal capacity are related to the spending in the context of the state of New York. This study provides empirical evidence that the property tax cap positively influenced local spending through contracting out, while the same variable negatively affected the spending through intermunicipal contracting. Second, the previous level of public spending was positively associated with the current level of public spending through contracts with other municipalities, but this is not the case for contracts with nongovernmental providers. In addition, in deciding the extent of public spending through contracting out, local government officials were influenced by the factors of fiscal capacity, indicated by budget solvency and tax revenues.

Is there an optimal size for local governments? A spatial panel data model approach

ABSTRACT The paper presents a framework for determining the optimal size of local jurisdictions and whether it varies depending on the geographical heterogeneity of the territory. To that aim, it first develops a theoretical model of cost efficiency that takes into account spatial interactions and spillover effects among neighbouring jurisdictions. The model solution leads to a spatial Durbin panel data specification of local spending as a non-linear function of population size. The model is tested using a large local data set over the period 2003–11 for an aggregate measure of public spending. The empirical findings suggest a ‘U’-shaped relationship between population size and the costs of providing public services. A second step investigates the role of geographical characteristics such as elevation and terrain ruggedness in the determination of the optimal jurisdiction size. The results reveal that optimal city size decreases with elevation and increases with ruggedness.

중국 지방정부의 문화예산 결정요인에 관한연구: 랴오닝성을 중심으로

Chinese local government has begun to vary in its local policy choices and the province of Liaoning has shown the growing variety emerging from the city governments formerly based in heavy industrial development. This study investigated the determinants of local cultural spending at the municipal1evel in Liaoning Province. Local cultural budgets have been studied well internationally, particularly with regards to political influences on expenditures. These factors appear to work differently in China due to the single party and therefore this study looked to Chinese demographic variables, education, economic variables,spending capacity, and tourism. The study seeks to answer the question of the relationship between cultural spending and these factors by examining cultural expenditures from all 14 metropolitan governments over a period often years from 2000-2010 that were gathered and analyzed using a random effects GLS regression model. Six of nine variables were significant. Among the demographic variables, the proportion of women and the number of youth were significant and negative and the number of senior citizens was positive and significant. Education and GDP were not significant. FDI was positive and significant. Local government debt was positive and significant. The tourism variables were split with foreign tourism not significant while domestic tourism was positive and significant. A discussion and conclusions follow.

Housing booms and local spending

This paper examines how local governments adjust their spending in response to a temporary revenue windfall generated by a housing boom. We focus on Spanish local governments because of the intensity of the last housing boom-bust experienced there and the large share of construction-related revenues they obtain. We find that windfall revenues were mostly used to increase expenditures (above all, current). We seek to determine whether this behaviour was due to political myopia (incumbents in contested elections increasing expenditures to convince uninformed voters about their competence) or to extrapolation bias (leading to the overstatement of the persistence of revenue shocks). We find evidence for both mechanisms: the propensity to spend is higher where local incumbents were elected by a narrow vote margin and lower in places with past volatility experience. Finally, we also examine what happens during the bust, and find that governments enjoying large windfalls during the boom had to cut their spending abruptly (above all, capital) and raise taxes. The adjustment during the bust was actually greater in those places that overspent more during the crisis.

Sharing Authority: The Politics and Practice of Community Policing in the Brazilian Slum

Over the last decade, Community Policing (CP) secured a central place in Brazilian public security policy, challenging traditional policing modalities known more for their lethal violence than their efficacy. But as the CP model moved from wealthy societies to the Brazilian favela (urban slum), it faced far greater challenges. Tasked with displacing the deeply rooted authority of drug gangs, it sought to extend state authority territorially, as well as to curb criminal violence. Paradoxically, it succeeded at the latter without achieving the former. Drawing on evidence from the Rio de Janeiro's Pacifying Police Units and Bahia's Community Security Bases, this study asks how Brazil's CP programs achieved their goals of reducing violence without displacing criminal authority. I argue that a common interest among police and locally embedded drug gangs in limiting violence led to tacit arrangements between them to share authority as a condition of peace.Related ArticlesMoreno‐Jaimes, Carlos. 2011. “Is Local Spending Responsive to the Poor? An Appraisal of Resource Allocation and Electoral Rewards in Mexico.” Politics & Policy 39 (6): 1021‐1052. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2011.00328.xOndetti, Gabriel. 2008. “Up and Down with the Agrarian Question: Issue Attention and Land Reform in Contemporary Brazil.” Politics & Policy 36 (4): 789‐815. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2008.00120.xSpalek, Basia. 2010. “Community Policing, Trust, and Muslim Communities in Relation to ‘New Terrorism.’” Politics & Policy 38 (4): 789‐815. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2010.00258.x

Is a Stormwater Fee a Rain Tax?

AbstractActivists who oppose local government spending can defeat creative stormwater programs, often by using the slogan “rain tax” to convince the public that the financing plan is a tax increase...

Do in-kind grants stick? The department of defense 1033 program and local government spending

The U.S. Department of Defense 1033 program transfers decommissioned military goods to local police departments. This is one of the largest grant-in-kind initiatives in the country’s history, accounting for over $5.2 billion in transferred goods and vehicles since 1997. Two features of this program are unique among intergovernmental grants, each working against the tendency to let grants supplant local resources: goods from the 1033 program are less directly fungible than monetary grants, and their acquisition entails little to no oversight by officials outside of law enforcement. While previous research shows that intergovernmental grants crowd out a large or equivalent degree of local spending, we find no evidence of crowd-out in the wake of 1033 acquisitions. The features of this program may therefore be useful when designing grants to increase local spending in a targeted category, but welfare is likely tempered by the absence of local oversight.

The determinants of local public spending on culture

AbstractMunicipalities in Poland are important makers of local cultural life. Municipalities organise and fund public cultural entities: libraries, houses of culture and so on. They decide on 70% of public spending on culture. The local spending on culture was grown in the past years. But the level of this spending varies between municipalities. The aim of this study is to find determinants of these differences. Public spending on culture is important in less-developed or peripheral regions where citizens do not have access to private cultural institutions. That is why this study focuses on rural municipalities. In econometric panel model, 1,565 units and their operational spending on culture in the years 2002–2014 is analysed. Four groups of potential determinants of spending are analysed: characteristics of local society, the financial condition of local government, characteristics of local politicians and the factors that influence the costs of cultural services. Such an approach has roots in the median voter model and is widely used in the analysis of decentralised spending, but the studies related to cultural spending are rare. To my knowledge, there is no such analysis for Poland or other East European countries. This study proved that an expenditure demand model is good for the analysis of local spending. This kind of analysis can help to understand local spending’s variation. It also helps to design the proper revenues equalisation system.

The Parallel Head Taxes of Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama: Economics As Morality and Its Populist Rejection

The legacies of Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama are alike intertwined with failed per capita taxes: Thatcher’s infamous local government poll tax and the individual mandate tax at the heart of Obama’s signature health care reform. Examining these two taxes together reveals that—despite the pronounced differences between the two political leaders—both taxes were conceived, enacted, met with virulent popular opposition, and ultimately repealed under remarkably parallel processes. Both taxes arose out of essentially the same economic idea, and in fact, this animating idea originated from the same small network of think-tank economists in both cases. Crucially, economic theory served as both the technical basis and the moral justification for the taxes. The Thatcher poll tax was morally justified as necessary to increase local government “accountability,” defined economically such that an accountable government is one where all citizens equally bear the full marginal cost of local government spending increases. Likewise, the moral basis of the individual mandate tax was “responsibility,” defined in economic terms such that a responsible person is one who bears the marginal cost imposed on society by their decision not to purchase health insurance. Neither Thatcher nor Obama conceived of or initially supported their respective per capita taxes, which instead arose from small, relatively isolated groups, heavily influenced by academic economists. Accordingly, the taxes were designed to fit abstract economic theories crafted by experts, with little regard for popular opinion or practical and historical experience. Not surprisingly, the taxes proved highly unpopular and hard to implement, imposing heavy political costs on Thatcher, Obama, and their respective parties. Despite the intense opposition from the populace, the major opposition parties initially either supported or at least accepted the taxes, only opposing them after popular anger became undeniable. The real fault lines that emerged were between the establishment political class and the majority of the electorate. This division was characterized by a preference for expert administration based on science—especially neoliberal economic theory—on the one hand, and a preference for popular sovereignty informed by traditional notions of fairness on the other. Popular perceptions of unfairness were amplified by the regressive nature of the taxes, and I argue that regressivity was a logical consequence of the economic theories undergirding the taxes.

Who benefits? Intergovernmental transfers, subnational politics and local spending in Ecuador

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the intervening role that local political elites play to translate government transfers into effective public spending. We want to know whether mayors spend IGTs to provide basic public services or infrastructure works, and whether such investments are instrumental to secure their advantage as incumbents. To test these arguments, we use a combined dataset of local public finances between 2001 and 2015 and electoral results for the 2009 and 2014 municipal elections in Ecuador. We find that mayors do respond to political incentives and make strategic spending decisions to invest on public services and visible infrastructure projects. However, we find selective spending was insufficient to secure incumbency advantage in the 2014 election. We argue that the executive intervened to block or limit the impact of spending decisions at the local level, thus creating an incumbency disadvantage for mayors. Further research is needed to explain this.

Legal Status and Local Spending: The Distributional Consequences of the 1986 IRCA

We examine the political response to immigrant legalization and its subsequent impact on the distribution of state and local spending by exploiting variation in legal status arising from the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized 3 million immigrants in the United States. We find that governors, of whatever party affiliation, allocate more per capita resources to counties affected by the IRCA. This effect is amplified when the governor is eligible for re-election, faces political competition, enjoys line-item veto power or is politically aligned with the state legislature, supporting a view that the distributional response is politically motivated. Individuals residing in counties affected by the IRCA tend to vote more in gubernatorial elections and a governor’s likelihood of reelection increases in the share of legalized migrants in a given state. We find no evidence of anti-migrant sentiment confounding our results. Finally, counties that received more transfers because of the IRCA spend more on education and, subsequently, experience improvements in Hispanic high school completion rates, suggesting that the distributional response is targeted to the newly legalized who were eligible to vote five years after legalization. Overall, our work helps understand the role of local public expenditure as a channel linking legal status to a wide range of socio-economic benefits, as documented by the literature.

Lost in Transition? The Persistence of Dictatorship Mayors

We look at Chile’s transition to democracy in 1990 to study the persistence of authoritarian politics at the local level. Using new data on the universe of mayors appointed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), and leveraging on the arbitrary election rules that characterized the first local election in 1992, we present two main findings. First, dictatorship mayors obtained a vote premium that is larger among the last wave of incumbents and appears partially explained by an increase in local spending. Second, dictatorship mayors who were democratically elected in 1992 brought votes for the parties that collaborated with the dictatorship in subsequent elections held in democracy. These results show that the body of politicians appointed by a dictatorship can contribute to the persistence of elites and institutions.

New Starts, Growing Inequities: Federal and Local Public Transit Funding

Equity concerns regarding local revenue sources are increasingly important in the United States, as local sales taxes for transportation increase amid perceived federal funding shortfalls. This study examines shifts in the federal role and local funding sources for public transit projects supported by the New Starts program. The analysis finds that total federal New Starts spending grew over this period, but was distributed across more costly projects, with a resulting decrease in the average federal share per project. As expected, there was increased sales tax use at the local level. The increase in local spending on transit should be met with concern. Prior research has established that sales taxes fail along both the beneficiary to pay and ability to pay equity principles. Thus, the recent massive commitment to expanding public transit infrastructure relies on concerning funding mechanisms and may also fail to prioritize the needs of those with limited accessibility.

Top-down place-based competition and award: local government incentives for non-GDP improvement in China

Top-down place-based competition and award (TDPBCA) has a growing presence in the West and a long existence in China. TDPBCA refers to the motivational strategy in which a higher authority sets a series of targets for lower-level governments to compete against each other or to pass the benchmarks set by the higher authority to become a winner. The participants (unit of assessment) are ‘places’ at the same level of jurisdiction (countries, cities, neighbourhoods, villages). This paper examines TDPBCA as a local motivation policy tool. It first reviews the literature on different local stakeholder motivation strategies and theorises the motivational impact of TDPBCA. The paper then examines the usage of TDPBCA in China and its influence on local stakeholders’ behaviour in terms of public participation, intersectoral collaboration, inter-regional learning and local public spending. The proposed paper examines TDPBC as a local motivation policy tool in China. The first section reviews the literature on different local stakeholder motivation strategies. The second section discusses theoretically the motivational impact of TDPBC. The paper then examines the usage of TDPBC in China and discusses its influence on local stakeholders’ behaviour in terms of public participation, inter-sectoral collaboration, inter-regional learning and local public spending.

PMH63 - ACCESS TO ANTI-DEPRESSANT THERAPIES IN ENGLAND: IS THERE A POSTCODE LOTTERY?

Postcode lottery is a term often associated with the geographic variation in prescribing and therefore patient access to drugs. Despite published recommendations from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE), regional and local variations in prescribing still exist. This study aims to evaluate the variation of regional spending on anti-depressant medication in the NHS across England and how it has changed over a four year period. Data were obtained from the NHS Digital Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) Prescribing Data at British National Formulary (BNF) Section level from January to March 2014 and January to March 2018. Anti-depressant medication prescribing relating to the BNF Chapter 4: Central Nervous System was analysed. Data were available from 211 CCGs in 2014 and 207 CCGs in 2018. Between January to March 2014 and the same period in 2018, the expenditure on anti-depressant medication in England decreased by approximately £14 million from £62 million in 2014 to £48 million in 2018. In 2014, the top 10 CCGs spent £8 million on anti-depressants compared to £992K spent by the lowest 10 CCGs representing an 8-fold decrease which was repeated in 2018. The average total cost per CCG decreased from £293,213 in 2014 to £231,721 in 2018. In 2014, the number of anti-depressant items prescribed was 13.6 million which rose to 17.1 million in 2018, a 26% increase. Despite a national focus on mental health and the development of clear NICE and local NHS, there is substantial variation in local spending and therefore prescribing of anti-depressant medications in England. The postcode lottery across England still continues despite NHS England’s policy to eliminate it.

ANALISIS EFEKTIVITAS DAN KONTRIBUSI BEA PEROLEHAN HAK ATAS TANAH DAN BANGUNAN (BPHTB) TERHADAP PENDAPATAN ASLI DAERAH (PAD) PADA BADAN PENGELOLAAN PAJAK DAN RETRIBUSI DAERAH KOTA MANADO

The land and building title transfer duty is one of the regional tax that has large contribution as the receiver of the original local government revenue.One measure of the ability of regions to exploit the income is how much the local tax sector contributes to local revenues, especially local revenues that can later be used as a source of funds / expenses to meet the needs of local spending concerned. The purpose of this research is to know the affectiveness and the contribution of the land and building title transfer duty in manado city. The method that is used in this research is descriptive with using qualitative approach. Based on the result of this research, it shows that the effectiveness of the land and building title transfer duty in 2014-2017 is rated quite effective, while in 2016 it was decreasing in the percentage, on the other hand, the contribuction of the land and building title transfer duty in original local government revenue was unstable from year to year. Keywords: Effectiveness, Contribution, Land and Building Title Transfer Duty, Original Local Government Revenue.