Decentralisation and inter-governmental relations in the housing sector
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismDigitalisation challenges and opportunities for subnational governments
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismPopulation ageing and sub-central governments
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)...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismTwenty years of tax autonomy across levels of government
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismDecentralisation and performance measurement systems in health care
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismThe impact of decentralisation on the performance of health care 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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismCross-country evidence on the impact of decentralisation and school autonomy on educational performance
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismThe spending power of sub-national decision makers across five policy sectors
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismAssigning responsibilities across levels of government
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismInsolvency Frameworks for Sub-national Governments
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismImproving the Performance of Sub-national Governments through Benchmarking and Performance Reporting
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismDecentralisation in a Globalised World
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismSub-central Tax Autonomy
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismValuation and Assessment of Immovable Property
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismThe Political Economy of Property Tax Reform
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismGreening the Property Tax
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismDecentralisation and Economic Growth - Part 3: Decentralisation, Infrastructure Investment and Educational Performance
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismDecentralisation and Economic Growth - Part 2: The Impact on Economic Activity, Productivity and Investment
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismDecentralisation and Economic Growth - Part 1: How Fiscal Federalism Affects Long-Term Development
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismTax Competition Between Sub-Central Governments
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismFiscal Policy Across Levels of Government in Times of Crisis
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismExplaining the Sub-National Tax-Grants Balance in OECD Countries
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...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismFinding the Dividing Line Between Tax Sharing and Grants
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,...
OECD > Fiscal FederalismThe Fiscal Autonomy of Sub-Central Governments
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...
OECD > Fiscal Federalism