Do Local Governments Engage in Strategic Property—Tax Competition?

Strategic Interaction Among Governments

Why do Governments Privatize?

The role of township-owned enterprises in the rapid growth of the Chinese economy during reform is widely acknowledged. Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, these firms began to be privatized. Perhaps the most striking feature of this process is that it has not occurred uniformly across townships. This raises the simple question: When and why do government leaders privatize? Drawing on a unique...

Endogenizing governments' objectives in tax competition

a r t i c l e i n f o In this paper we endogenize objective functions of the regions in case the of tax competition for foreign owned mobile capital. First, considering symmetric regions and simultaneous move tax competition, we demonstrate that the competing regions can restrict 'race-to-the-bottom' in tax rates by deviating away from social welfare to net tax revenue. Moreover, it is optimal ...

Fiscal competition in health spending among local governments in the Philippines.

The Philippines is one of several Asian countries that has decentralized the provision of health care to its local governments in recent decades. In the context of decentralization, a few studies have previously examined the issue of fiscal competition among local governments in the developing world. This report presents a summary of a published study that examined the existence of inter-jurisd...

Tax competition among local governments: Evidence from a property tax reform in Finland

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighboring municipalities. I do not find evidence of interdependence in property tax rates among Finnish...