Public Administration

Fiscal equalisation refers to the transfer of financial resources to and between subnational governments with the aim of mitigating regional differences in fiscal capacity and expenditure needs. However, the determination of fiscal capacity and...

This paper describes and analyses the fiscal rules for subnational governments (SNGs) in OECD countries immediately prior to the COVID-19 crisis. It is based on information from the 2019 survey of fiscal rules for SNGs by the OECD Network on Fiscal...

The bulk of government investment is done at the local level in OECD countries, representing on average 41% of total public investment. Most studies on subnational government debt focus on the regional or state level, and very few studies analyse...

The Coronavirus pandemic has put extreme pressure on public health services, often delivered at the local and regional levels of government. The paper focuses on how countries made changes to the configuration of federalism during the first wave of...

Based on a survey, this paper presents new data on the decentralisation of the housing system and co-ordination mechanisms across levels of government, focusing on the provision of social housing. Decision-making in social housing tends to be more...

The world economy and societies are going through a digital transformation that goes well beyond computerisation and use of information and telecommunications technologies. This transformation is creating opportunities and challenges for all levels...

The population in OECD countries is ageing rapidly, which will have significant macroeconomic impacts, including on public expenditure and tax revenues. This paper analyses the consequences of population ageing at the sub-central government (SCG)...

The Network on Fiscal Relations has been assessing the degree of sub-central government tax autonomy in OECD countries for almost two decades. This paper provides an in-depth description of the methodology used to characterise tax autonomy. After...

Based on an OECD survey, this paper presents quantitative and qualitative data on the decentralisation of health systems, focusing on how they vary according to different institutional characteristics and what types of performance measurement systems...

This paper examines the relationship between the degree of administrative decentralisation across levels of government in health care decision-making and health care spending, life expectancy as well as hospital costs. This empirical analysis builds...

How do administrative and fiscal decentralisation relate to education system performance? The question is answered by exploiting a panel with several different measures of fiscal decentralisation: a measure of administrative decentralisation, as well...

The paper develops new measures of spending power and performance across five key sectors of sub-national government service delivery –- education, long-term care, transport services, social housing and health care. The new indicators reveal unique...

The past decades have seen an undeniable trend towards decentralisation and greater diversity of multilevel governance arrangements around the world. Decentralisation outcomes depend on the way decentralisation is designed and implemented. A key...

Sub-national insolvency frameworks stipulate rules and procedures to resolve sub-national debt in a prompt and orderly way. As such they may serve to facilitate debt restructuring and the fiscal recovery of sub-national entities. They may even...

Performance systems are one tool available to central governments to improve the performance of sub-national service delivery. This paper provides a preliminary review of suitable metrics and mechanisms to reliably measure and monitor the efficiency...

Globalisation accompanied by the growing importance of information technology and knowledge-based production pose challenging problems for federations. We summarise the difficulties that traditional decentralised federations face in addressing...

This paper provides an update of the indicators that measure the tax autonomy of sub-central governments in OECD countries. Over the last decade, tax autonomy at the state level increased, while it hardly changed at the local level. The OECD now has...

This paper addresses the following questions about immovable property taxation in OECD and partner countries: What is valued? How is it valued? And who values? It draws on published information and data on property tax policy and administration in...

Property taxes are generally considered by economists to be good taxes, and many countries are being advised to increase and improve their property taxes. In practice, however, property tax reforms have often proved to be difficult to carry out...

This paper reviews the literature and policy discussions about the role of the property tax for land use. Various externalities of the development of land, such as new infrastructure needs, the loss of open space or air pollution due to longer...

Theories of fiscal competition between jurisdictions suggest that investment in productive relative to consumptive spending is higher in a decentralised setting, and that efficiency of the public sector is also higher. This paper empirically analyses...

This paper analyses the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and economic activity. Like other institutional arrangements, fiscal decentralisation affects firms, households and public entities, and the way they save, invest, spend or...

Intergovernmental fiscal frameworks usually reflect fundamental societal choices and history and are not foremost geared towards achieving economic policy objectives. Yet, like most institutional arrangements, fiscal relations affect the behaviour of...

Tax competition is the strategic interaction of tax policy between sub-central governments (SCG) with the objective to attract and retain mobile tax bases. Tax competition rests on firms’ and households’ willingness and ability to shift the tax base...

The world is recovering from the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. The recovery will probably be shallow and government deficits could remain very large over the next few years in a number of countries. The crisis has a...

Normative principles provide a relatively clear set of rules for the balance between grants and taxes (box 1 reviews the normative theory), but in practice a variety of types of tax-grant systems are observed in OECD countries, which do not all...

Tax sharing and intergovernmental grants are two sub-central funding arrangements that are often difficult to disentangle. The dividing line is not drawn uniformly across OECD countries or across time, and rules established in National Accounts,...

This paper describes the progress that has been made since 2006 in establishing statistical databases on tax autonomy and intergovernmental grants, aiming to better understand sub-central finance and intergovernmental fiscal relations. The paper is...