Suchergebnisse

At head of title: Voeu national, écho du pays messin. ; Magis catalog 38, item 1203. ; Mode of access: Internet.

In many reforming socialist economics like Hungary, the ownership of previously state-owned assets has been transferred to local governments as part of the decentralization and privatization reforms. The authors discuss these recent reforms in Budapest, and examine their impact on the solvency of local governments there. The analysis suggests that a continuation of the current pricing policies now in place in Budapest will pose serious long-run solvency problems for the new local governments that have been given ownership of the assets, effectively decapitalizing many of them. Even so, the privatization is unlikely to lead to a change in these pricing policies, and it may well lead the local governments to undertake actions that adversely affect the broader stabilization program.

Recent theoretical research suggests that financing sub-national governments' expenditure out of own revenue sources is linked to more responsible budgeting, because the financial implications of spending decisions then are internalized within a jurisdiction. We test this proposition empirically on a sample of 23 OECD countries over the 1975-2000 period, and find evidence in line with the hypothesis that greater revenue decentralization (measured as sub-national governments' share of own source tax revenues in general government tax revenue) is associated with improved sub-national government budget deficits/surpluses. This finding is cross-validated with a novel, independent dataset consisting of all 34 OECD member states from 2002 to 2008.