Economic aspects of decentralized government: structure, functions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tax revolts have erupted against property taxation in the US and the UK. Dissatisfaction has also grown with income taxation in parts of Scandinavia and with various aspects of decentralized fiscal arrangements in Belgium, France, Spain and other European countries. Yet discussions of local tax reform often focus exclusively on the merits and demerits of a single tax instrument. Little attention is paid to the links between the structure and functions of local government. The narrowness of the debate has been further reinforced by a tendency to focus on an artificial contrast between federal and unitary states in analysing the working of decentralized fiscal mechanisms. Among the most heavily studied English-speaking countries, the contrast between federal countries such as the US, Canada and Australia and unitary UK are polar cases which may tell us little about alternative fiscal arrangements. This paper adopts a comparative approach to the analysis of fiscal decentralization.' In Section 2 we examine a wide range of industrial countries and find that there is no dominant model. Rather the diversity of existing arrangements in different countries is striking. This leads us to consider in Sections 3 and 4 how far the theory of fiscal federalism can be applied to European countries. The standard analysis emphasizes
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".