Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) represents a politics of repair for American Federalism. The unprecedented size, scope, and timeliness of ARPA enable local governments to address some of the structural inequities laid bare by the pandemic. U.S. Federalism was broken before the pandemic, with states exerting a triangle of pressures that created a tightening vice on local government through revenue restrictions, downloading expenditure responsibilities, and restricting local policy authority. Recent federal action through ARPA has helped ease the pressure on local revenue, enabling new expenditures and new policy action. ARPA is larger, longer, and more expansive than the American Rescue and Recovery Act passed after the Great Recession. We analyze revenue and expenditure data for all local governments and special districts from 2000 through 2022. ARPA represents a layer in the palimpsest of federalist policy, a politics of repair, that reminds us that more cooperative federal-local relations are possible.

Since the onset of the Great Recession, austerity has become more common at the national and local levels throughout the OECD. As states pass expenditure responsibilities down to the local level, this causes a shift toward mandatory spending at the local level which may undermine discretionary spending for social and physical infrastructure. We use Census of Government Finance data from 2012 for all county areas in the continental US to model the expenditure gap between current operations and capital investment, and show how this crowd out affects growth. Our structural equation models find fiscal decentralization has direct negative effects on local growth and indirect negative effects on growth by increasing the local current-capital expenditure gap. This local expenditure gap is larger where decentralization of spending responsibility is higher and state aid is lower, especially in places with greater need (poverty, older infrastructure, and rural areas). In contrast to the theoretical claims of fiscal efficiency, we find fiscal decentralization may be undermining local economic growth by increasing the gap between local current and capital expenditure. We argue that fiscal federalism (decentralization) is "broken" in the US because states have structural incentives to shift fiscal responsibility downward to local government, and local governments face increased social and economic need, especially since the Great Recession.

Abstract
What factors explain the divergence between returns to labour and overall productivity across US counties? We model the role of power at the subnational state level: Republican partisan control, corporate lobbying (measured by ALEC-sponsored bills) and labour power (unionisation). We find where state policy is captured by corporate interests, this undermines inclusive growth. Our hierarchical models use 2012 data for county areas in the continental USA and find labour returns are higher in states with more unionisation, but lower in states with Republican control and more corporate penetration of state legislatures. Labour and local government power have limited effect.

Devolution to the subnational state and local level has increased reliance on locally raised revenue to provide basic social, infrastructural, and economic development services. We conduct multilevel regression models of local government fiscal effort (locally raised revenue normalized by population and income) of all county areas in the continental United States for the period 2002–2007. Spatial regression and geographically weighted regression are used to understand differential spatial effects of subnational state policies on local fiscal effort across counties. In contrast to conventional fiscal federalism theory, which argues local government is the developmental state, we find increased spatial inequality as expenditures driven by local need may crowd out expenditures related to growth and development. Nonmetropolitan counties and older suburbs exhibit higher local effort, while suburban outlying areas have lower effort. State rescaling requires more attention to policies of the subnational state, particularly state aid and state centralization of fiscal responsibility to ensure that both redistributive and developmental expenditures can be maintained under devolution.