Using capital cities in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States as case studies, this book examines federal policies towards capital cities, with a particular emphasis on how capital cities are funded and governed, and the extent to which the federal government compensates them for their unique role.
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The conventional theory of fiscal federalism, which sees earmarking largely as a means to deal with positive spillovers in local expenditures, explains neither the level of such grants nor the trends over time. Nor can it readily account for the existence of non-matching, but still categorical, block grants. In this paper, we explore several alternative perspectives that interpret earmarking as a response to information failures between governments and, even more fundamentally, to accountability issues that arise between governments as well as between governments and voters.
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This paper provides a case study of provincial-local transfers in Canada and evaluates the extent to which they are designed to increase local accountability or maintain provincial control. The evaluation is based, in part, on a review of trends in provincial transfers to municipalities and school boards over the last 20 years and, in part, on an assessment of the extent to which 3 grants are designed to satisfy the standard rationales for intergovernmental transfers found in the traditional fiscal federalism literature (vertical fiscal imbalance, horizontal fiscal imbalance, and externalities) or political rationales.
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This paper presents a summary analysis of the important changes in township and village finance in China between 2000 and 2004, based on a survey of 100 villages in 50 townships in 25 counties in five provinces.
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A paper by André Côté, a Masters student at the School of Public Policy and Governance and holder of the Alan Broadbent Fellowship in Municipal Finance and Governance.
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Co-sponsored by the Toronto Community Foundation, on March 5, 2008, with a presentation by Danish economist Jorgen Lotz, and panelists Glen Murray, President and CEO, Canadian Urban Institute, and Mario Lefebvre, Director of the Centre for Municipal Studies at the Conference Board of Canada.
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This paper assesses the impact of municipal financial tools and governance on the pattern of urban growth. The first part considers how financing tools can affect urban growth patterns and analyzes the impact of four specific financing tools: development charges, property taxes, user fees, and tax increment financing. The second part considers the role played by local governance on urban growth patterns. The third part provides some concluding comments on approaches to finance and governance that could improve the prospects for compact development.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and extent of the fiscal imbalance at the municipal level in Canada.
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