alternative approaches to money and growth this paper reexamines the issue of money and growth in an economy with both endogenous labor supply and endogenous capital stock using three recently developed approaches the money in the utility function approach the cash in advance approach and the transactions costs approach by establishing a qualitative equivalence between alternative setups the authors find economically justifiable conditions such that all comparative statics results derived from the aforementioned approaches are identical copyright 1992 by ohio state university press

micro incentives and municipal behavior political decentralization and fiscal federalism in argentina and mexico summary this article analyzes the mixed results of political and fiscal decentralization in latin america by comparing taxing and spending policies in six cities in argentina and mexico consistent with previous studies we find that decentralization has been frustrated by overconcentration of power at the provincial level and large vertical fiscal imbalances though we characterize these as functional elements in a system of redistributive policy making that benefits a wide array of provincial and municipal actors we seek to add a new dimension to the literature by arguing that micro level incentives conditions and circumstances particular to specific places are more important determinants of municipal behavior than macro level structures those policy and institutional changes intended to make officials more responsive to local conditions federalism local elections intergovernmental transfers and own source revenues we conclude that the theory of decentralization relies on a flawed conception of the causal mechanisms that are hypothesized to create responsiveness in local officials

inflation persistence in central and eastern european countries this article studies inflation persistence with time varying coefficient autoregressions for 12 central european countries in comparison with the united states and the euro area we find that inflation persistence tends to be higher in times of high inflation since the oil price shocks inflation persistence has declined both in the united states and the euro area in most central and eastern european countries for which our study covers 1993 2012 inflation persistence has also declined with the main exceptions of the czech republic slovakia and slovenia where persistence seems to be rather stable our findings have implications for the conduct of monetary policy and for a possible membership in the euro area among the two time varying coefficient methods we use our results favour the flexible least squares smoother over the kalman smoother we also conclude that the ols estimate of an autoregression is likely upward biased relative to the time average of time varying parameters when the paramete

reducing bureaucratic corruption interdisciplinary perspectives on what works abstract this article offers the first comprehensive review of the interdisciplinary state of knowledge regarding anti corruption policies with a particular focus on reducing corruption among civil servants drawing on the work of economists political scientists sociologists and anthropologists we examine seven policy categories 1 rewards and penalties 2 monitoring 3 restructuring bureaucracies 4 screening and recruiting 5 anti corruption agencies 6 educational campaigns and 7 international agreements notably rigorous empirical evaluation is lacking for the majority of commonly prescribed anti corruption policies nevertheless we find growing evidence of the effectiveness of policies based on monitoring including anti corruption audits and e governance in addition adequate civil service wages seem to be a necessary but insufficient condition for control of corruption an emerging skepticism regarding the effectiveness of anti corruption agencies also is apparent in the literature we conclude with broader lessons drawn from our review such as the recognition that when corruption is a systemic problem it cannot be treated in the long term with individual level solutions

monopolistic competition increasing returns to specialization and output persistence abstract devereux et al economics letters 1993 41 57 61 showed that introducing together imperfect competition and increasing returns to specialization into real business cycle rbc type models results in making output more persistent than the underlying technology shocks we carry out a simple generalization of their model which clearly disentangles the two features and show that the added persistence is actually because of the increasing returns to specialization

money output and income velocity this paper attempts to assess empirically the contribution of three structural shocks monetary institutional financial and fiscal and technological to output and velocity fluctuations in the national bank era and the post 1973 period to identify these shocks we impose only long run restrictions derived from a monetary growth model we find that higher money growth increases decreases velocity in the first second period depending crucially on the resulting changes in the transactions frequency credit enhancing financial or expansionary fiscal shocks have a permanent positive effect on velocity and a himp shaped effect on output whereas technological shocks cause velocity to decrease in the short run and output to move to a permanently higher level

does decentralization contribute to efficiency evidence from oecd countries abstractthis article provides evidence on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and technical efficiency we begin the first stage of this study with a data envelopment analysis to obtain technical efficiency estimates for a sample of 23 oecd countries over the period 1992 2009 in a second stage we explore the effects of fiscal decentralization and other control variables on technical efficiency the results including all the control variables reveal a statistically significant negative relationship between fiscal decentralization of public expenditure and technical efficiency

natural disaster impacts and fiscal decentralization in recent years many developing countries have sought to implement more decentralized governmental systems despite efforts toward fiscal federalism assessment of decentralization activity has been hampered by lack of consistent cross country measures of effectiveness since governments play a central role in the management of catastrophic events disaster impact data provide an opportunity to evaluate whether government structure is important in limiting disaster losses we use cross country data over the 1970 2005 period to estimate the relationship between decentralization and disaster casualties countries with more decentralized governments experience fewer disaster induced fatalities jel h73 q54

the effects of regional sizing on growth in this paper a micro founded model dealing with the effects of regional sizing on economic growth is developed departing from bigger sizes reduction involves more efficient public choices because of proximity to individual preferences and needs but also creates the risk of underestimation of the real profitability of public expenditure by local governments due to cross border spillovers and predator behaviors hence the optimal size depends on the relative strength of both effects moreover we show that different institutional arrangements between fiscal tiers involve different results for each possible size using data from the spanish regions during the period 1984 1996 the relationship between productive spending and jurisdiction size is then analyzed

optimal taxation and intergovernmental transfer in a dynamic model with multiple levels of government abstract in this paper we study the optimal choices of the federal income tax federal transfers and local taxes in a dynamic model of capital accumulation and with explicit game structures among multiple private agents multiple local governments and the federal government in general the optimal local property tax is zero if the local property tax is constrained to be nonnegative whereas the optimal local consumption tax is always positive when the local consumption tax is chosen optimally the federal income tax can be either positive or negative for most reasonable parameter values our numerical calculations have shown that with a positive local consumption tax there exists a reverse transfer from local governments to the federal government

political decentralization economic growth and regional disparities in the oecd ezcurra r and rodriguez pose a political decentralization economic growth and regional disparities in the oecd regional studies recent scholarly work has addressed whether decentralization affects economic growth and regional disparities by typically resorting to fiscal decentralization while disregarding political decentralization indices this article covers this gap by investigating the association between different political decentralization indices with two measures of economic performance changes in gross domestic product gdp per capita and in territorial inequalities the results suggest a lack of statistical relationship between political decentralization and economic growth regardless of how political decentralization is measured in the case of regional disparities the results depend on the index used and range from the absence of a link to a positive association between both factors ezcurra r and rodriguez pose a oecd

taxes federal grants local public spending and growth abstract in a dynamic model with both private and local public capital accumulation this paper examines how federal and local income taxes local consumption tax and federal matching grants for local public consumption and local public investment affect the long run equilibrium equilibria of private consumption private capital accumulation local public consumption and local public capital stock

endogenous growth and real effects of monetary policy r d and physical capital complementarities we study the real long run effects of the structural stance of monetary policy and of inflation in the context of a monetary growth model where r d is complemented with physical capital accumulation we look into the effects on a set of real macroeconomic variables that have been of interest to policymakers the economic growth rate real interest rate physical investment rate capital to labor ratio r d intensity and velocity of money these variables have been previously analyzed from the perspective of different separated strands of the theoretical and empirical literature additionally we analyze the long run relationship between inflation and both the effectiveness of real industrial policy shocks and the market structure assessed namely by average firm size we present novel cross country evidence on the empirical relationship between the latter and long run inflation

fiscal federalism and economic growth this paper uses an endogenous growth model with overlapping generations to explore the connection between fiscal federalism and economic growth the analysis shows that federalism which allows public good levels to be tailored to suit the differing demands of young and old consumers who live in different jurisdictions increases the incentive to save this stronger incentive in turn leads to an increase in investment in human capital and a byproduct of this higher investment is faster economic growth

money and the welfare cost of inflation in an r d growth model this study analyzes the effects of inflation on r d and innovation driven growth in the theoretical section we incorporate money demand into a quality ladder model with elastic labor supply and derive the following results if the elasticity of substitution between consumption and the real money balance is less greater than unity then r d and output growth are decreasing increasing in inflation if either labor supply is inelastic or the elasticity of substitution between consumption and the real money balance is unity then social welfare monotonically increases as the nominal interest rate approaches zero i e the friedman rule quantitatively decreasing inflation in the us to achieve price stability improves welfare equivalent to a permanent increase in consumption of at least 0 5 in the empirical section we use cross country data to establish a negative and statistically significant relationship between inflation and r d

does the local government structure affect population and income growth an empirical analysis of the 1952 municipal reform in sweden hanes n and wikstrom m does the local government structure affect population and income growth an empirical analysis of the 1952 municipal reform in sweden regional studies the main purpose of the paper is to analyse if the swedish municipal reform in 1952 affected subsequent income growth and population movements the empirical analysis is conducted using data for the period 1953 to 1959 the main result is that the municipal amalgamations had no effect on the municipal income growth patterns however a positive effect on population growth is found for the municipalities that were small in size prior to the reform it is also found that the composition of the municipalities formed affected subsequent growth hanes n et wikstrom m la structure de l administration locale influence t elle la croissance de la population et des revenus une analyse empirique de la reforme municipale suedoise de 1952 regional studies cet article cherche principalement a analyser si oui ou non la reforme municipale

natural resources decentralization and risk sharing can resource booms unify nations previous studies imply that a positive regional fiscal shock such as a resource boom strengthens the desire for separation in this paper we present a new and opposite perspective we construct a model of endogenous fiscal decentralization that builds on two key notions a trade off between risk sharing and heterogeneity and a positive association between resource booms and risk the model shows that a resource windfall causes the nation to centralize as a mechanism to either share risk and or prevent local capture depending on the relative bargaining power of the central and regional governments we provide cross country empirical evidence for the main hypotheses finding that resource booms i decrease the level of fiscal decentralization with no u shaped patterns ii cause the former due to risk sharing incentives primarily when regional governments are relatively strong and iii have no effect on political decentralization

does decentralization reduce income inequality only in rich states we investigate the relationship between fiscal decentralization and income inequality using data from u s states over three and a half decades our study contributes to the literature in several ways in terms of empirical methodology and specification first we take into account integration and cointegration properties of the data and estimate the cointegratingrelationship between fiscal decentralization and income inequality using fully modified ordinary least squares following pedroni 2000 second we investigate the direction of the causality finally and perhaps most importantly we investigate if the relationship between fiscal decentralization and income inequality is conditional on income in each state we find that fiscal decentralization does reduce income inequality but only in rich states we also find that causality runs from fiscal decentralization to income inequality not the other way around

fiscal decentralization and development outcomes in india an exploratory analysis summary this paper attempts to quantify the impact of fiscal decentralization in india on its social infrastructure and on rural development overall the results in this paper indicate that government of india within a federal framework has been fostering development equitably across its states particularly through health and education expenditures aimed at improving human capital development in this context the importance of the two tier centre states decentralization should be noted however the third tier of local governance particularly the state rural local bodies decentralization has been dismal and has not achieved significant results across states which warrant the attention of the central and state governments

decentralization and economic growth in europe for whom the bell tolls the effects of fiscal decentralization on economic growth are analyzed a theoretical framework is developed that builds on the relationships between government size and growth and between decentra

does tax competition really promote growth abstract this paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input absent stochastic shocks decentralized tax setting two or more jurisdictions maximizes the rate of growth as the constant returns to scale present with endogenous growth implies extreme tax competition stochastic shocks imply that households face a portfolio choice problem which dampens down tax competition and may raise taxes above the centralized level growth can be lower with decentralization our results also predict a negative relationship between output volatility and growth with decentralization

what do oecd countries cut first when faced with fiscal adjustments expenditure in this article we explore the relationship between components of government expenditure and government size during the period 1970 2007 for a sample of 25 developed countries to shed light on how fiscal discipline might influence public spending composition in the coming years using the pooled mean group estimation we find that fiscal adjustments protect functions that have both a social and productive character such as education and health spending in addition the most productive spending that related to transport and communications is also isolated from budgetary cuts this result shows evidence of governments reacting to the voter s increasing realization that reducing productive expenditures harms long term economic growth by striking a balance between utility and economic growthenhancing expenditure

local decentralization and local economic growth a cross sectional examination of us metropolitan areas this paper builds on the growing empirical literature that explores the relationship between government structure and economic growth it uses a new data set of 314 us metropolitan areas to examine the relationship between local decentralization and local economic growth the results indicate a negative relationship between the central city share of metro area population and economic growth and a positive relationship between both the number of municipalities per 100 000 residents and the number of counties per 100 000 residents and economic growth those findings provide support for the hypothesis that decentralization enhances economic growth

fiscal decentralization and economic growth abstract fiscal decentralization may indeed have a direct impact on economic growth but the theoretical underpinnings for this relationship remain largely undeveloped a fair summary of the empirical search for a direct relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth is that it remains an open question much less attention has been devoted in the literature to the indirect channels through which fiscal decentralization may affect economic growth we argue that much work remains to be done before policy advisors and decision makers can formulate and implement decentralization programs on the basis of improving the rate of economic growth

fiscal decentralization and economic growth reconsidered recent studies examining the relation between fiscal decentralization and economic growth have failed to take account of the extent of the independent taxing powers available to sub national governments and thus have substantially overstated the degree of effective decentralization results from a cross section study of 19 oecd member countries suggest that when the measure of fiscal decentralization is limited to the revenues over which sub national governments have full autonomy its impact on economic growth is not statistically significant

regional economic disparities and decentralisation the study of the influence of decentralisation on economic growth has received some attention in recent years but very few studies deal with its impact on regional inequalities this paper analyses the impact of both fiscal and political decentralisation on regional inequalities using alternative measures for a sample of 17 oecd countries in order to check for other possible influences the study also includes measures of public sector size and the type of party in government the final section studies the relevance of fiscal decentralisation in the regional convergence process observed by several authors during the past two decades the research reveals a strong negative correlation between decentralisation especially fiscal decentralisation and regional inequalities and also a positive influence of decentralisation on regional convergence

dynamic effects of federal grants on local spending abstract in a dynamic model of local government spending this paper examines both long run and short run effects of permanent federal grant changes on local public investment and recurrent expenditures it also utilizes the judd approach to quantify the short run effects of temporary current and future policy shocks the interesting perhaps surprising findings are 1 a permanent increase in the matching grants for investment and recurrent expenditures may accelerate or slow down public investment and 2 a current temporary grant increase stimulates current public investment but a temporary future increase in the nonmatching grant reduces current investment and raises current recurrent expenditures

federal competition and economic growth abstract this paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the united states to estimate the causal impact of inter jurisdictional competition on income growth we find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17 increase in the average annual growth rate of earnings per employee over 1969 2006 and a 10 increase in 2006 income per employee decomposing income effects using 2000 census worker level data we find that approximately half of the effect stems from making workers more productive while the other half comes from changing the composition of the workforce and inducing workers to work more hours we also present evidence that inter jurisdictional competition leads local governments to raise more in taxes spend more and issue more debt per capita but does not help them obtain more inter governmental transfers however the additional cost from this increase in expenditures to a median wage employee is much smaller than the increase in that employee s wages due to greater inter jurisdictional competition

aid growth and devolution considering aid modality and different types of decentralization in this paper we provide further evidence on the relationship between decentralization and foreign aid effectiveness our previous work has shown that decentralization decreases aid effectiveness i e the impact of aid on economic growth is negative in decentralized countries however our previous work has not taken different types of aid and different types of decentralization into account which is at the heart of our current analysis we consider different measures of decentralization in particular measures of fiscal decentralization derived from government finance statistics and measures of political decentralization that are constructed based on countries constitutional rules in addition we take different types of aid into account grants loans technical assistance total net oda and we distinguish between multi lateral and bi lateral aid in order to consider differences in the donor structure our empirical analysis is based on panel data of up to 53 developing countries in our growth regressions we combine all types of decentralization with the different types of aid we find important differences between different types of decentralization i fiscal decentralization negatively affects aid effectiveness in line with our previous work ii employment decentralization may increase aid effectiveness and iii political decentralization does not hamper aid effectiveness or may even have positive effects

the economic effects of federalism and decentralization a cross country assessment this paper explores the idea that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by employing a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details based on a principal component analysis seven aspects of both federalism and decentralization are used as variables for explaining differences in 1 fiscal policy 2 government effectiveness 3 economic productivity and 4 happiness the results show that institutional details do indeed matter different aspects of federalism impact on the outcome variables to different degrees this study adds to our knowledge on the transmission mechanisms of federalism and decentralization

inflation targeting a new framework for monetary policy he world s central bankers and their staffs meet regularly in venues from basle to washington to share ideas and discuss common problems perhaps these frequent meetings help explain why changes in the tactics and strategy of monetary policymaking such as the adoption of money growth targets in the 1970s the intensification of efforts to reduce inflation in the 1980s and the recent push for increased institutional independence for central banks tend to occur in many countries more or less simultaneously whatever their source major changes in the theory and practice of central banking are of great importance for both individual countries and the international economy in this article we discuss a new strategy for monetary policy known as inflation targeting which has sparked much interest and debate among central bankers and monetary economists in recent years this approach is characterized as the name suggests by the announcement of official target ranges for the inflation rate at one or more horizons and by explicit acknowledgment that low and stable inflation is the overriding goal of monetary policy other important features of inflation targeting include increased communication with the public about the plans and objectives of the monetary policymakers and in many cases increased accountability of the central bank

decentralization and economic growth revisited an empirical note abstract although it is theoretically expected that decentralization leads to efficient provision of local public services and stimulates economic development there is a mixed picture of the decentralization effect on economic growth across earlier empirical studies using the instrument variables iv technique with the latest cross country data for the period from 1997 to 2001 this paper found that fiscal decentralization has a significant positive impact on per capita gdp growth therefore when the focus is placed on the latest information on the economic situation in the latter 1990s decentralization particularly on the fiscal expenditure side is instrumental in economic growth

contrasting models of the effect of inflation on growth the paper formulates a nesting model for studying the theoretical literature on inflation and endogenous growth it analyses different classes of endogenous growth models with different usage of physical and human capital with different exchange technologies first the paper shows that a broad array of models can all generate significant negative effects of inflation on growth second it shows that these models can be differentiated primarily by the fact whether there is a tobin type effect of inflation and also whether the inflation growth effect becomes weaker as the inflation rate rises a non linearity or stays essentially constant over the range of inflation rates the paper compares these features of the models to empirical evidence as a way to summarize the efficacy of the models

decentralization and inflation commitment collective action or continuity do political and fiscal decentralization make it easier or harder to control inflation statistical analysis of average annual inflation rates in a panel of 87 countries in the 1970s and 1980s found no clear relationship between decentralization and the level of inflation political decentralization however does appear to reduce change in countries relative inflation rates over time by creating additional veto players federal structure may lock in existing patterns of monetary policy whether inflationary or strict among the mostly developed countries that started with low inflation inflation tended to increase more slowly in federations than in unitary states among the mostly developing countries that started with high inflation inflation tended to increase faster in the federations there is evidence that political decentralization locks in a country s degree of practical central bank independence whether high or low and the relative hardness or softness of budget constraints on subnational governments

the effects of inflation on the number of firms and firm size a typical money and growth model generally incorporates an implicit assumption that the number of firms or the set of goods available is fixed this paper attempts to investigate the implications of relaxing this assumption in a monopolistically competitive model with endogenous markup it is found that among other effects inflation reduces the number of firms and each firm s size moreover due to this new channel inflation induces secondary effects one direct implication is that the welfare costs of inflation in our framework are substantially higher than those documented in existing models with standard features our findings suggest that it is the lessening of competition that appears to be the primary driving force

inflation investment and growth a money and banking approach output growth investment and the real interest rate in long run evidence tend to be negatively affected by inflation theoretically inflation acts as a human capital tax that decreases output growth and the real interest rate but increases the investment rate opposing evidence this paper resolves this puzzle by requiring exchange for investment as well as consumption inflation then decreases the investment rate and still decreases both output growth and real interest up to some moderately high rate of inflation above which increasingly low investment finally causes capital to fall relative to labour and the real interest rate to rise

the impact of fiscal decentralization on the composition of public expenditure panel data evidence from italy grisorio m j and prota f the impact of fiscal decentralization on the composition of public expenditure panel data evidence from italy regional studies this paper is an original contribution to the understanding of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and public expenditure composition it studies the effects of the ongoing decentralization process in italy on the share of different categories of public spending in total expenditure of the italian regional administrations over the period 1996 2008 the data used allow one to go beyond the usual distinction between current and capital expenditures and to present a functional classification of public expenditures through a panel data analysis the paper shows that the level of decentralization influences the composition of expenditure

the behavior of money velocity in high and low inflation countries this paper presents a general equilibrium model of money demand where the velocity of money changes in response to endogenous fluctuations in the interest rate the parameter space can be divided into two subsets one where velocity is constant as in standard cash in advance models and another one where velocity fluctuates as in baumol 1952 the model provides an explanation of why for a sample of 79 countries the correlation between the velocity of money and the inflation rate appears to be low unlike common wisdom would suggest the reason is the diverse transaction technologies available in different economies

inflation and balanced path growth with alternative payment mechanisms the paper shows that contrary to conventional wisdom an endogenous growth economy with human capital and alternative payment mechanisms can robustly explain major facets of the long run inflation experience a negative inflation growth relation is explained including a striking nonlinearity found re peatedly in empirical studies a set of tobin 1965 effects are also explained and further linked in magnitude to the growth effects through the interest elasticity of money demand undis closed previously this link helps fill out the intuition of how the inflation experience can be plausibly explained in a robust fashion with a model extended to include credit as a payment mechanism

the impact of fiscal decentralization on economics performance in high income oecd nations an institutional approach this paper examines the impact of public sector decentralization on per capita income controlling for differences in institutional arrangements among countries panel data regressions on a sample of observations from 20 high income oecd nations spanning the years 1972 to 2005 indicate that decentralization is positively related to income the empirical analysis shows that institutions consistent with economic freedom enhance the positive income effects of decentralization thus the impact of public sector decentralization is dependent upon a nation s institutional environment

fiscal federalism decentralization and economic growth a meta analysis the theoretical literature on fiscal federalism has identified several channels through which government decentralization could affect economic growth much of the literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services but decentralization may also increase growth by raising the ability of the political system to innovate and carry out reforms in contrast some authors argue that decentralization increases corruption and government inefficiency and thus may diminish growth given this theoretical ambiguity several studies have attempted to identify the effect of decentralization on economic growth empirically over the last two decades we review and conduct a meta analysis of this empirical literature based on our analysis we point out open questions and discuss possible ways to answer them jel h77 043 c52 i introduction building on various theoretical contributions an empirical literature analyzing the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth has emerged since the 1990s the relevant studies vary as to whether they use cross sectional time series or panel data as to whether they rely on cross country or single country samples and they vary in estimation methods decentralization measures and sample composition given the size and heterogeneity of the empirical literature it is useful to review the individual studies and summarize their main findings conducting a comprehensive search we identify 31 published and unpublished studies on the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth each of these studies estimates several models resulting in over 400 individual estimates while we first review these studies in a traditional manner our main aim is to analyze these estimates quantitatively specifically the main contribution of this article is to offer a meta analysis of the empirical findings on fiscal decentralization and economic growth a meta analysis is a useful methodology in our context as it is difficult to obtain clear cut conclusions with only a traditional survey of empirical literature the individual studies vary substantially in their characteristics and correspondingly in the findings they report by conducting a meta analysis however we can identify how the idiosyncratic characteristics of a particular study relate to its findings the meta analysis approach thus addresses model uncertainty with regard to each individual estimate in addition it can also serve as a partial response to the methodological critique of empirical research on fiscal decentralization by rodden 2004 as it helps to clarify the quantitative effects of different decentralization measures and estimation techniques finally as meta analytical techniques are rarely used in economics we also aim at contributing to the further establishment of this methodology stanley 2001 2008 the next section briefly discusses the various theoretical arguments as to why fiscal decentralization may affect economic growth we then provide a short traditional survey of the empirical studies in section iii we review this literature more systematically and quantitatively in section iv in section v we report the results of meta regressions and discuss how the idiosyncratic characteristics of a given study are related to its specific findings finally section vi provides a discussion of the results and some conclusions ii how could fiscal federalism affect economic growth theoretical approaches within the framework of the solow swan model solow 1956 swan 1956 fiscal federalism may be associated with a different level of efficiency in governance than unitary systems leading to a different value of solow s a the level of technology a regime change toward federalism would then be associated with temporarily different growth rates and eventually different levels of income but not with persistent growth differences

fiscal decentralization and economic growth a cross country study abstract we use a panel data set of 46 countries over the 1970 1989 period to investigate the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth we find a negative relationship between fiscal decentralization and growth in developing countries but none in developed countries several explanations are offered for our findings

federal state and local governments evaluating their separate roles in us growth we use us county level data from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and government employment at three levels federal state and local increases in federal state and local government employments are all negatively related to economic growth we find no evidence that government is more efficient at lower levels while we cannot separate out the productive and redistributive services of government we document that the county level income distribution became slightly more unequal from 1970 to 1998 we conclude that a release of government employed labor inputs to the private sector would be growth enhancing

the allocation of publicly provided goods to rural households in india on some consequences of caste religion and democracy abstract what determines the allocation of publicly provided goods to rural households in india although empirically driven this paper draws on the characteristics of india s institutional structure and the implications of existing literature for framing the answer to this question we confront the main empirical implications drawn from this framework with a unique data set which brings together widely used district data with a recently constructed data set on political participation we identify three robust determinants of this allocation process formal and informal characteristics of each state allocation mechanism selectivity in the allocations against muslims and scheduled castes and bureaucratic rules and behavior

the welfare cost of inflation in general equilibrium abstract this paper presents a general equilibrium monetary model in which inflation distorts a variety of marginal decisions although individually none of the distortions is very large they combine to yield substantial welfare cost estimates a sustained 4 percent inflation like that experienced in the us since 1983 costs the economy the equivalent of 0 41 percent of output per year when currency is identified as the relevant definition of money and over 1 percent of output per year when m1 is defined as money the results illustrate how the traditional partial equilibrium approach can seriously underestimate the true cost of inflation

the composition of public expenditure and economic growth abstract noting that the literature has focused on the link between the level of public expenditure and growth we derive conditions under which a change in the composition of expenditure leads to a higher steady state growth rate of the economy the conditions depend not just on the physical productivity of the different components of public expenditure but also on the initial shares using data from 43 developing countries over 20 years we show that an increase in the share of current expenditure has positive and statistically significant growth effects by contrast the relationship between the capital component of public expenditure and per capita growth is negative thus seemingly productive expenditures when used in excess could become unproductive these results imply that developing country governments have been misallocating public expenditures in favor of capital expenditures at the expense of current expenditures

fiscal decentralization and economic growth in the oecd what impact if any does fiscal decentralization fd have on economic growth further investigations of the inter relationships between fd and economic growth are timely given that government decentralization remains at the forefront of many organization for economic cooperation and development oecd policy agendas this study incorporates a range of measures of fd to better account for the direct impact of different levels of subnational fiscal autonomy on economic growth the analysis also considers the impact of previously omitted public sector decentralization variables that provide further indication of the extent to which subnational governments sng are closer to the people and potentially better able to account for local preferences in fiscal decision making whilst little evidence of a direct relationship between fd and output growth is found some evidence is found to suggest that federal systems tend to have lower growth rates than do unitary states independent of their degree of decentr

aid growth and devolution summary this paper examines whether the degree of fiscal decentralization in aid receiving countries matters in explaining aid effectiveness the decentralization theorem predicts that the devolution of powers should increase aid effectiveness since local decision makers are better informed about local needs thereby decentralization may also have reverse effects e g through coordination problems excessive regulation administrative costs and local capture we use panel data for up to 60 countries and find that aid contributes to economic growth in centralized developing economies whereas it is less effective or even harmful in decentralized countries the cases of indonesia the philippines and uganda support our findings our results imply that donor countries should carefully consider how the two development instruments foreign aid and decentralization interact

searching for leviathan an empirical study in several papers and a recent book geoffrey brennan and james buchanan 1977 1978 1980 have put forth a striking and controversial view of the public sector drawing by analogy on the conventional theory of monopoly in the private sector they envision a monolithic government that systematically seeks to exploit its citizenry through the maximization of the tax revenues that it extracts from the economy from this perspective they develop a fiscal constitution whose central purpose is to constrain leviathan by limiting in various ways its access to tax and other fiscal instruments while the leviathan hypothesis has been the source of lively debate and a wide range of policy proposals it has not been the subject of much systematic empirical work or testing this is a matter of some importance since the policy implications of the leviathan view are disturbing to put it mildly in particular brennan and buchanan virtually stand on their heads many of the basic theorems in public finance for an efficient and equitable tax system if in fact the leviathan view is an inaccurate depiction of the functioning of the public sector the introduction of their policy proposals is likely to make a sorry mess of the fiscal system the leviathan model does however have some straightforward implications for observable fiscal behavior it is the purpose of this paper to examine one of these testable implications brennan and buchanan stress that fiscal decentralization is itself a powerful constraint on leviathan competition among governments in the context of the interjurisdictional mobility of persons in pursuit of fiscal gains can offer partial or possibly complete substitutes for explicit fiscal constraints on the taxing power 1980 p 184 such competition among governments in a federal system that places heavy reliance on local fiscal decisions will greatly limit the capacity of leviathan to channel resources into the public sector in short as indicated by the epigraph to this paper the leviathan model implies that other things equal the size of the public sector should vary inversely with the extent of fiscal decentralization 2