Fiscal Decentralization and Public Sector Size in Australia*

Fiscal decentralization, ideology, and the size of the public sector

Article history: Received 18 August 2009 Received in revised form 9 February 2011 Accepted 19 March 2011 Available online 13 April 2011 No consensus has yet emerged on whether fiscal decentralization facilitates or impedes the growth of the public sector. One explanation for this ambiguity in the literature is that the effect of fiscal decentralization on public sector size depends on the gover...

Would less fiscal decentralization reduce public sector size across sectors in Europe?

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the recent impact of fiscal decentralization in Europe on total expenditure for specific government functions as well as on total government size. A panel dataset for the years 2000 to 2009 for European countries has been constructed from EUROSTAT data. The effects of decentralization interact with the degree of vertical imbalances and tend to be neg...

Fiscal decentralization and public debt

Excessive borrowing by subnational governments due to soft budget constraints and intergovernmental coordination failures might be one of the perils of decentralization. Despite a large body of case studies, empirical investigations on whether decentralization increases consolidated public debt levels are still scarce. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring econometrically for se...

Fiscal Decentralization and Government Size

This paper explores the link between fiscal decentralization and government size in Latin America. While most related work attempts to test Brennan and Buchannan's "Liviathan" hypothesis, here the emphasis is placed on a different channel: the potential for decentralization to aggravate the common pool problem. In addition to the degree of expenditure decentralization, we consider the importanc...

Fiscal Decentralization and Government Size in Latin