Fiscal Decentralization and the Challenge of Hard Budget Constraints
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A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.231 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
A multi-country study of the conditions under which decentralized countries might ensure fiscal discipline. In many parts of the world, lower levels of government are taking over responsibilities from national authorities. This often leads to difficulty in maintaining fiscal discipline. So-called soft budget constraints allow these subnational governments to expand expenditures without facing the full cost. Until now, however, there has been little understanding of how decentralization leads to large fiscal deficits and macroeconomic instability. This book, based on a research project at the World Bank, develops an analytical framework for considering the issues related to soft budget constraints, including the institutions, history, and policies that drive expectations for bailouts among subnational governments. It examines fiscal, financial, political, and land market mechanisms for subnational discipline in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Hungary, India, Norway, South Africa, Ukraine, and the United States. The book concludes that the dichotomy between market and hierarchical mechanisms is false. Most countries—and virtually all developing countries—must rely on market mechanisms as well as hierarchical constraints to maintain fiscal discipline. When bailouts cannot be avoided, they present important opportunities to reform underlying institutions. Successful market discipline—where voluntary lenders perform important monitoring functions—is most likely to emerge from a gradual process that begins with carefully crafted rules and oversight.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- The MIT Press eBooks
- Topic
- Local Government Finance and Decentralization
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- DecentralizationMarket disciplineBudget constraintBudget processGovernment (linguistics)EconomicsPoliticsCentral governmentFiscal policyEconomic policyBusinessMacroeconomicsFinancePolitical scienceLocal governmentMarket economyPublic administration
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes