Search Results (48)

Water and sanitation governance sits at the intersection of global development ambitions and highly localized service realities. While SDG6 sets universal targets for clean water and sanitation, the institutional and fiscal arrangements that translate those targets into actual service outcomes operate primarily at the subnational level. The discrepancy between globally defined objectives and locally executed delivery creates a structural research gap: how do the fiscal architectures of local governments influence progress towards SDG6? This study addresses this question for a panel of OECD countries by developing a deep learning-based estimation framework that combines bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks with Tianji’s horse racing optimization (THRO) algorithm. Three distinct operationalizations of fiscal decentralization are tested against SDG6 outcomes: subnational expenditure share (EFDM), subnational revenue share (RFDM), and a composite index balancing both dimensions (CFDM). Model adequacy is assessed using a layered diagnostic protocol involving regression fit, country-level residual patterns, error density profiles, Bland–Altman limits of agreement and inter-annual error trajectories. Among the three configurations, CFDM consistently records superior performance ($R^2=0.9216$; $RMSE = 1.4465$; $MAE = 1.0712$), while even the weakest specification clears $R^2=0.89$, attesting to the overall robustness of the proposed architecture. The margin by which CFDM outperforms its alternatives highlights a key finding: neither spending authority nor revenue capacity alone accurately reflects the fiscal reality of local water and sanitation governance; it is their combined effect that is important. The expenditure dimension is further proven to be the more influential of the two unidimensional proxies, consistent with the capital-intensive and maintenance-heavy nature of water infrastructure. On the other hand, coefficient findings show that fiscal decentralization is positively associated with SDG6 achievement for all models. Beyond its empirical contributions, the study introduces a methodological template for applying hybrid AI optimization to policy-relevant sustainability panels. It also connects two largely parallel bodies of scholarship, fiscal federalism and SDG research, that have rarely been examined together. Full article

Environmental taxation constitutes a key instrument of climate policy and plays an increasingly important role in decentralised governance systems. Using Spain as an empirical setting characterised by high fiscal decentralisation and pronounced territorial heterogeneity, we analyse the determinants of regional environmental taxation, accounting for both internal regional conditions and cross-regional policy interaction. Employing spatial panel econometric techniques, we provide robust evidence of spatial interaction and temporal persistence in regional environmental taxation at both the intensive and extensive margins. We also find that regional environmental taxation depends not only on domestic economic, institutional, and political characteristics, but also on those of neighbouring regions. These patterns are consistent with key theoretical mechanisms in fiscal federalism and public economics, including tax competition, yardstick competition, the double dividend hypothesis, NIMBY-type responses, and development–environment dynamics. Fur-ther analysis at the intensive margin reveals adjustment patterns consistent primarily with upward dynamics, although some evidence of downward responses is also found. In particular, upward adjustments appear to be more systematic, while downward responses are limited to regions with relatively lower environmental taxation. This asymmetry sug-gests that competitive pressures do not operate uniformly across jurisdictions. From a sustainability and governance perspective, the findings show that environmental tax policies in decentralised systems are shaped by strategic inter-regional interdependence, influencing the trajectories of regional sustainability transitions rather than reflecting isolated policy choices. Full article

This paper is an investigation into the degree to which regulatory quality and economic policy uncertainty influence loan performance in 15 Sub-Saharan African countries. The data for the study were drawn from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, covering the period 2008Q1–2024Q4. Using quarterly panel data, we employ a Panel autoregressive distributed lag (PARDL) with the addition of a Quantile ARDL (QARDL) approach to account for non-homogeneous effects of different levels of non-performing loans. Empirical feedback reveals that sound and effective regulatory quality substantially reduces non-performing loans, most especially in fragile financial regimes. Also, it was established that monetary and fiscal and economic policy uncertainty always enhances non-performing loans, especially during stress conditions, and this is an indication of the asymmetric state-dependent nature of the policy risk in the weak banking systems. The study concludes that increasing the quality of the regulatory system should be a key objective of financial sector reforms in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). In addition, there is a need for regional coordination, such as regulatory harmonization and policy signalling, between countries in SSA, to reduce cross-border spillover effects and increase financial stability in a more interdependent financial system. Full article

This article examines how the redistributive design of crisis-time fiscal policy shaped Belgian federal public debt trajectories from 1912 to 2024. Drawing on a reconstructed debt-to-GDP series and historical–institutional analysis, it identifies a secular transformation in the distributive logic of fiscal adjustment. From 1912 to the late 1970s, broadly speaking, debt surges were addressed through explicitly progressive instruments grounded in the ability-to-pay principle, and on the view that capital should be taxed at least as heavily as labour. From the 1980s onward, this paradigm gave way to a competitiveness-oriented model that eroded tax progressivity, detached capital from the global tax base, and shifted the fiscal burden onto consumption and labour—disproportionately affecting middle-income earners. The evidence presented in this article points to three plausible determinants of this transformation: the role of mass warfare in legitimising progressive taxation; the ideological shift from Keynesian interventionism to supply-side orthodoxy; and the twin constraints of internal federalisation and external Europeanisation. Furthermore, the timing and modalities of these adjustments appear to have been significantly shaped by linguistic party fragmentation and the recurrent use of emergency executive powers—a pattern that was increasingly mirrored in the European Union’s own governance. Ultimately, since 2020, crisis management has relied almost exclusively on debt-financed expenditure. While the EU has temporarily acted as a redistributive counterweight to domestic fiscal paralysis, these ad hoc supranational interventions have left Belgium’s underlying debt trajectory unchanged. Full article

What is the influence of different multilevel governance architectures on the provision of infrastructural powers? Multilevel governance corresponds [i] to the vertical distribution of decisions and responsibilities between territorial spheres of government, or [ii] polycentric relationships among different agents. In this work, the focus is on vertical [Type I], and polycentric models [Type II] are outside the scope of this study. Only the vertical subnational perspective will be considered, which can be associated with federalism, decentralization in administrative, fiscal and political dimensions or the scale of authority exercised by subnational governments. The result is the construction of a scale and typology of multilevel governance in the region, considering the influence on government “infrastructural powers” and, subsequently, indicators of and effective territorial penetration. Full article

Nigeria entered the 2020 COVID-19-related oil price downturn without the fiscal buffers that numerous resource-rich economies had built over time. Despite heavy dependence on petroleum revenues, the country has made limited use of stabilization tools such as structured hedging programs, sovereign savings mechanisms, or strategic reserves, leaving public finances exposed to external shocks. Drawing on political choice theory and the resource governance literature, this study examines how institutional conditions shaped crisis management during the 2020 oil price collapse and the COVID-19 pandemic. The study combines qualitative institutional analysis with a stochastic counterfactual simulation. It compares Nigeria’s policy approach with those of oil-producing countries including Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Angola, and Ghana, using data from the IMF, World Bank, Afreximbank, and peer-reviewed sources. The counterfactual simulation is calibrated to Nigeria’s 2019 federal budget oil benchmark of US $60 per barrel, with the IMF’s 2019 petroleum price assumption used as a robustness check. The model treats hedging as a form of partial fiscal insurance rather than full stabilization. Results suggest that hedging sufficient to offset 10%, 20%, and 30% of the shock would have improved 2020 GDP decline from −1.80% to approximately −1.62%, −1.44%, and −1.26%, respectively. The analysis identifies institutional gaps in Nigeria’s use of hedging, sovereign savings, and reserve infrastructure. The counterfactual results indicate that even modest oil hedging could have meaningfully softened the 2020 downturn, with the 20% scenario reducing GDP contraction by an estimated 0.36 percentage points. These findings suggest that governance constraints contributed materially to fiscal vulnerability. The study proposes a four-pillar framework centered on risk hedging, revenue savings, strategic investment, and institutional reform to strengthen fiscal stability and resilience to external shocks. Full article

This study investigates why U.S. states vary in their spending of federal funds under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, the primary federal program grant to support low-income families with children. Grounded in fiscal federalism and state welfare politics, the study examines how political and institutional settings shape states’ spending decisions, using panel data from all 50 states from fiscal year 2004 to 2016 and a two-way fixed effects model. The results indicate that policy and political factors significantly impact states’ spending decisions, whereas most socioeconomic indicators do not. In particular, states with a TANF job-search requirement allocate a larger share of TANF funds to child care than those without such requirements. However, this positive effect becomes negative when female legislative representation exceeds a certain threshold. These findings demonstrate that policy design and political representation interact to shape the implementation of federal grants at the state level. The study suggests that state allocation decisions under federal block grants are closely tied to institutional design and political context, with broader implications for welfare governance under federalism. Full article

This research examines the impact of positive crude oil revenue shocks on Russia’s macroeconomic policy and economic development, analyzes the effects of macroeconomic policy on the economy, and compares these effects across two subsamples (2005–2013 and 2015–2019). The study proves that the full 2005–2019 model fails to capture the transmission responses of policy and macroeconomic variables after the significant structural shift in the post-2014 period, while subsample models each provide a better fit and more accurate results. Our empirical research provides the following insights: First, after 2014, fiscal expansion shifted from an anti-inflationary tool to an inflationary driver as well as a depreciating force on the national currency. Second, after 2014 the monetary policy’s tight stance became explicitly anti-inflationary compared with its direct opposite effects before 2014. Third, after 2014, the central bank’s more dominant inflation-targeting regime tightened the constraints on fiscal policy. Fourth, the Russian Federation’s economic dependence on oil diminished after 2014. Finally, macroeconomic policy (government expenditure and key interest rate) shifted from procyclical to countercyclical in response to oil revenue shocks after 2014. Full article

This study examines the impact of international trade shocks from South Africa and recent U.S. federal tax reforms on state-level municipal bond returns within the United States. Employing a unique transaction-level dataset comprising more than 50 million municipal bond trades from 2020 to 2024, the empirical approach integrates machine learning estimators with econometric volatility models to examine daily nonlinear spillovers and structural complexity across twenty U.S. states. The study introduces and extends the application of a vector radial basis function neural network framework, leveraging its universal approximation capacity to jointly model multiple state-level outcomes and uncover complex response patterns The empirical results reveal substantial cross-state heterogeneity in bond-return resilience, influenced by variation in state tax regimes, economic complexity, and differential exposure to external financial forces. States exhibiting higher economic adaptability demonstrate faster recovery and weaker shock amplification, whereas structurally rigid states experience persistent volatility and slower mean reversion. These findings demonstrate that complexity-aware predictive modeling, when combined with granular fiscal and trade-linkage data, provides valuable insight into the pathways through which global and domestic shocks propagate into U.S. municipal bond markets and shape subnational financial stability. Full article

Amid intensifying challenges of global climate change, China—as the world’s largest carbon emitter and a major manufacturing hub—occupies a pivotal position in the global industrial green transformation. Drawing on environmental federalism theory and China’s decentralized governance model, this study develops a framework of “green finance–local government competition–industrial green transformation.” Using panel data from 283 cities in China, we employ spatial econometrics and mediation effect models to test the dual mechanisms by which green finance promotes industrial green transformation. The findings indicate that (1) green finance promotes industrial green transformation; (2) green finance advances industrial green transformation by dismantling China’s traditional local government competition–based development model and removing the institutional suppression arising from “race-to-the-bottom competition”; (3) the effect of green finance exhibits long-run characteristics and a “benchmark–imitation” pattern; (4) baseline environmental conditions strengthen the influence of green finance on industrial green transformation; (5) incorporating ecological civilization development into officials’ performance evaluations can effectively reshape policy incentives and amplify the positive role of green finance. Thus, we propose differentiated green finance policies, the construction of a governance mechanism that integrates fiscal–financial–ecological compensation, and the optimization of ecological civilization assessment indicators to curb campaign-style governance. Full article

This study examines how socialization costs, inspection costs, collection costs, motor vehicle tax rates (Pajak Kendaraan Bermotor, PKB), vehicle ownership transfer tax rates (Bea Balik Nama Kendaraan Bermotor, BBNKB), the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), and the Indonesian Digital Society Index (Indeks Masyarakat Digital Indonesia, IMDI) influence regional tax compliance across 34 provinces in Indonesia, using secondary data from 2020 to 2024. Guided by Fiscal Federalism, Tax Optimization Theory, and the Fischer Tax Compliance Model, the analysis integrates spatial regression and SWOT to capture both structural and spatial dynamics in provincial tax administration. The spatial error model reveals that socialization costs, PKB, and BBNKB significantly shape provincial tax compliance. At the same time, the other variables show no measurable effect. Spatial clustering indicates High–High compliance in Central Java, Low–Low compliance in South Sumatra and Lampung, and Low–High compliance in North Sumatra. The SWOT assessment places Indonesia’s provincial tax compliance strategy in Quadrant I, suggesting strong institutional capacity and substantial external opportunities to support aggressive improvement strategies. This study contributes by providing province-wide empirical evidence on the fiscal and administrative determinants of compliance and by incorporating collection costs and spatial relationships into the analysis. Policy implications include strengthening targeted socialization, improving rate-setting mechanisms, and expanding digital reporting systems to enhance taxpayer understanding and administrative transparency. Full article

This study is intended to conduct a comprehensive review of federalism. This study starts from the institutional aspect and analyzes how federalism, as a compound structure, divides power between the central and local governments. Then, this study mentions that federalism also has its normative connotations, which are traceable to the theological concept of a covenant. We also elaborate on how the success of the United States’ federalism strengthened its institutional aspect while overshadowing the older covenant tradition. Next, this study presents a typological framework of federalism, introducing concepts such as coming-together federalism and holding-together federalism; dual federalism and cooperative federalism; decentralization and non-centralization; and asymmetrical federalism, non-territorial autonomy, and consociationalism, presidential and parliamentary federalism, as well as democratic federalism and authoritarian federalism/facade federalism. Next, this study compares monist federalism with multinational federalism. Then, this study examines the specific applications of federalism in fiscal, environmental, health-care, and social-welfare policies. By reviewing the history, theoretical origins, institutional development, and contemporary manifestations of federalism, this study provides a roadmap for scholars in the field of federal studies. Finally, this study also puts forward several testable hypotheses, aiming to provide operational research agendas for future studies. Full article

Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are required to prepare a Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) that outlines a fiscal strategy over a four-year period in order to qualify for federal funding. However, the growing population and limited financial resources available often pose significant challenges for transportation agencies in aligning their needs with available budgets. This article examines the project selection criteria used by 20 MPOs in the Southeastern United States to identify the best practices for prioritizing projects in TIPs. Using document analysis, this study categorizes the most commonly used criteria into nine broad groups: safety and security; environmental impacts; mobility, accessibility, and connectivity; preservation; environmental justice; equity; economic factors; alignment with other plans; and local support. Many of these categories are further divided into subcategories and metrics. Despite variations in criteria, weighting, scoring, and methodologies across these MPOs, the study identifies several shared factors that support effective decision-making in regional transportation planning. These findings can help transportation planners and policymakers refine their project prioritization strategies, promote consistency, and lead to improved decision-making frameworks for future TIP development. Full article

This paper aims to test the hypothesis of the existence of significant tax competition between communes, which mainly concerns the share of value-added tax (VAT) proceeds, by exploring the system for allocating intergovernmental transfers in Morocco and analyzing the determinants of VAT transfers to local authorities. It contributes to fiscal federalism by assessing the design of the decentralized system and intergovernmental transfers. It aims to explore and understand the variables determining decentralization in Moroccan Municipalities over the period 2014–2018, based on institutional, budgetary, and political justifications, as well as their influence on local tax efficiency, highlighting the importance of intergovernmental transfers and their impacts on local government autonomy. We find that VAT revenue transfer antecedents include factors such as public expenditure, fiscal potential, tax effort, and political alignment. The results of this study can help better understand the relationship between VAT and economic variables and guide government tax policies in an emerging economy. This paper offers original perspectives on the importance of an informed vision for government decision-makers to develop effective tax policies considering stringent local budget constraints, the need for VAT revenue autonomy across levels of government, and the need for meeting the redistributive goals of the current VAT system. Full article

Natural disasters are becoming increasingly frequent, as evidenced by the catastrophic floods in 2024, which marked the worst disaster in the history of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. This article explores fiscal sustainability through the budgetary capacity of municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul within the framework of Brazilian fiscal federalism. To assess this capacity, an indicator was employed to measure the proportion of current revenues allocated to current expenses and investments, alongside the degree of autonomy in resource transfers. The findings reveal significantly constrained fiscal sustainability among municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul, hindering their ability to respond to climate events in the region. Of the 453 municipalities analyzed, only 19% demonstrated sufficient budgetary space. Among those officially declared in a state of calamity, a mere 10% were eligible for a budgetary response. The economic losses associated with the disaster are estimated at 88.9 billion BRL, while collectively the municipalities of RS dedicated 5.6 billion BRL to investments in 2023. Given limited fiscal capacity and the enormous scale of losses from natural disasters, this article argues for financial solutions aimed at prevention and mitigation, involving federal cooperation and greater budgetary and financial commitments at the national level. Full article