Subnational governments’ capacity to effectively fund and deliver public services are crucial for the realisation of the benefits of decentralisation. However, subnational capacities often suffer from significant weaknesses, ranging from inadequate assignments of own-revenues, through to flaws in tax administration, the design of intergovernmental transfers, spending assignments and various aspects of public financial management.
Subnational governments' capacity to effectively fund and deliver public services are crucial for the realisation of the benefits of decentralisation. However, subnational capacities often suffer from significant weaknesses, ranging from inadequate assignments of own-revenues, through to flaws in tax administration, the design of intergovernmental transfers, spending assignments and various aspects of public financial management. The volume discusses how better diagnostics and more strategic reforms can contribute to easing the resource constraints on subnational governments, as well as creating appropriate incentives for these governments to improve performance. The volume includes studies of the enabling conditions for subnational capacity building in Asia, as well as focused studies of China and India's fiscal relations challenges.
This annual publication provides details of taxes paid on wages in OECD countries. It covers personal income taxes and social security contributions paid by employees, social security contributions and payroll taxes paid by employers, and cash benefits received by workers. Taxing Wages 2021 includes a special feature entitled: “Impact of COVID-19 on the Tax Wedge in OECD Countries”.
This book takes an interdisciplinary look at how the institutions of intergovernmental fiscal relations are shaped, drawing on work by both academics and practitioners in the field.
Subnational governments' capacity to effectively fund and deliver public services are crucial for the realisation of the benefits of decentralisation. However, subnational capacities often suffer from significant weaknesses, ranging from inadequate assignments of own-revenues, through to flaws in tax administration, the design of intergovernmental transfers, spending assignments and various aspects of public financial management. The volume discusses how better diagnostics and more strategic reforms can contribute to easing the resource constraints on subnational governments, as well as creating appropriate incentives for these governments to improve performance. The volume includes studies of the enabling conditions for subnational capacity building in Asia, as well as focused studies of China and India's fiscal relations challenges.
The economic activity that drives growth in developing countries is heavily concentrated in cities. Catchphrases such as “metropolitan areas are the engines that pull the national economy” turn out to be fairly accurate. But the same advantages of metropolitan areas that draw investment also draw migrants who need jobs and housing, lead to demands for better infrastructure and social services, and result in increased congestion, environmental harm, and social problems. The challenges for metropolitan public finance are to capture a share of the economic growth to adequately finance new and growing expenditures and to organize governance so that services can be delivered in a cost-effective way, giving the local population a voice in fiscal decision making. At the same time, care must be taken to avoid overregulation and overtaxation, which will hamper the now quite mobile economic engine of private investment and entrepreneurial initiative. Metropolitan planning has become a reality in most large urban areas, even though the planning agencies are often ineffective in moving things forward and in linking their plans with the fiscal and financial realities of metropolitan government. A growing number of success stories in metropolitan finance and management, together with accumulated experience and proper efforts and support, could be extended to a broader array of forward-looking programs to address the growing public service needs of metropolitan-area populations. Nevertheless, sweeping metropolitan-area fiscal reforms have been few and far between; the urban policy reform agenda is still a long one; and there is a reasonable prospect that closing the gaps between what we know how to do and what is actually being done will continue to be difficult and slow. This book identifies the most important issues in metropolitan governance and finance in developing countries, describes the practice, explores the gap between practice and what theory suggests should be done, and lays out the reform paths that might be considered. Part of the solution will rest in rethinking expenditure assignments and instruments of finance. The “right” approach also will depend on the flexibility of political leaders to relinquish some control in order to find a better solution to the metropolitan finance problem.
This project, based on the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) data set, researched how PEFA can be used to shape policy development in public financial management (PFM) and other major relevant policy areas such as anticorruption, revenue mobilization, political economy analysis, and fragile states. The report explores what shapes the PFM system in low- and middle-income countries by examining the relationship between political institutions and the quality of the PFM system. Although the report finds some evidence that multiple political parties in control of the legislature is associated with better PFM performance, the report finds the need to further refine and test the theories on the relationship between political institutions and PFM. The report addresses the question of the outcomes of PFM systems, distinguishing between fragile and nonfragile states. It finds that better PFM performance is associated with more reliable budgets in terms of expenditure composition in fragile states, but not aggregate budget credibility. Moreover, in contrast to existing studies, it finds no evidence that PFM quality matters for deficit and debt ratios, irrespective of whether a country is fragile or not. The report also explores the relationship between perceptions of corruption and PFM performance. It finds strong evidence of a relationship between better PFM performance and improvements in perceptions of corruption. It also finds that PFM reforms associated with better controls have a stronger relationship with improvements in perceptions of corruption compared to PFM reforms associated with more transparency. The last chapter looks at the relationship between PEFA indicators for revenue administration and domestic resource mobilization. It focuses on the credible use of penalties for noncompliance as a proxy for the type of political commitment required to improve tax performance. The analysis shows that countries that credibly enforce penalties for noncompliance collect more taxes on average.
