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The impact of fiscal decentralization on equalization between regions has received significant attention but there has been much less research of the impact of decentralization on equalization within regions. Theory suggests that the tradeoff between local fiscal autonomy and equalization ought to be most pronounced at the sub-region level where rural-urban disparities in the level of development are substantial. This paper is an empirical analysis of the impact of fiscal decentralization on equalization within one Russian region, Leningrad (State). We show that the regional government uses a mixture of fiscal instruments to strike a balance between giving more budgetary autonomy to local governments and eliminating the disparities among them. We also develop a method for studying this tradeoff between decentralization and equalization when only limited data are available. Finally, we argue and demonstrate that without a detailed understanding of the institutional arrangement for intergovernmental fiscal relations, one cannot evaluate the equalization or decentralization implications.

This paper updates and expands Norton's 1979 study of the political economy of city life cycles in thirty jurisdictions. Using 1970 and 1976 fiscal data, Norton had found that older cities of the Northeast and North Central states provide a more extensive range of services and have a stronger commitment to social welfare functions than younger cities of the South and Southwest. A thirty-five city survey using 1991 data generally confirms his findings. We found significant differences in the service mix, spending patterns and revenue sources of older and younger cities. Older cities offer a broader mix of services with the most dramatic differences among redistributive and safety functions, and notable differences in the public works and administrative services categories. Older cities expend more per capita on local services and exhibit different spending priorities. They spend propor-tionately more on redistributive services, eg. health, hospitals, welfare and housing. They also spend more per capita on police, fire and education. On the revenue side, older cities depend more on commercial property taxes, while newer cities rely more on residential property taxes. The most significant difference on the revenue side, however, concerns the greater reliance of younger cities on locally generated non-tax sources (eg. user fees), whereas older cities remain more dependent on intergovernmental aid.

Bond rating studies have received and continue to receive considerable attention in the literature on government finance. This study focuses on two major issues of municipal bond ratings that occupy the center-stage of these discussions: What charac-teristics does a rating institution analyze when assigning rating to a government? How significant are these characteristics in predicting the ratings given by these institutions? Using a combination of economic, financial, and demographic factors, the study reexamines these questions on a select group of cities.

Following decades of weak financial capacity of local governments in raising enough revenues to finance their budgets, this paper aims to examine the impact of jurisdictional fragmentation on property taxes in Ghana. Since independence in 1957, many local governments in Ghana are yet to build their fiscal capacity to collect enough own source revenues to support their local budgets. All local government laws in Ghana have assigned property taxes to local governments.

The paper uses quantitative econometric techniques with local level panel data from 2010 to 2016 to examine the impact of fragmenting assemblies in Ghana.

The paper finds that fragmenting local governments have an overall negative effect on property taxes in district assemblies in Ghana. However, fragmentation of metropolitan assemblies has an overall positive effect on property taxes, relative to district assemblies. In the case of municipal assemblies, fragmentation has a net positive effect on property taxes but an overall marginally negative effect, relative to district assemblies. Also, the paper finds that grants, capital expenditure and administrative expenditure of local governments do not impact on the collection of property tax revenues in all types of assemblies in Ghana.

The paper concludes that relative to metropolitan assemblies, fragmenting districts assemblies is not congruent with government efforts to promote the collection of property taxes in Ghana.

Several theories of the new politics and new economy suggest that amenities drive urban development. Do they? Two new amenity measures affect population growth differently. Natural amenities include six components like moderate temperature and water while constructed amenities include opera, juice bars, museums, and Starbucks.

Do people move toward such amenities? Yes the total population does, controlling up to 20 variables in multiple regressions for 3,111 U.S. counties. But subpopulations differ. College graduates are more numerous where there are fewer natural but more constructed amenities. The elderly are the opposite: they increase more with natural amenities, but less with constructed amenities. Residents filing high tech patents live in locations with more of both natural and constructed amenities.