Preparing Local Tax Expenditure Reports: A Practical Guide for Local Governments

ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability Preparing for Tomorrow

Tax Expenditure: A Study of components of the Selected Countries’ Tax Expenditures Reports

The existence of tax concessions (tax exemption, tax holiday, allowances …) provide the possibility of reducing tax liability via special tax provisions or regulations in tax laws  for some taxpayers, hence government loses  some tax revenues. Therefore, the forgone tax revenues resulting from some of the tax concessions for particular taxpayers, regions and sectors of an economy, are considere...

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...

The Local Response to Tax Limitation Measures: Do Local Governments Manipulate Voters to Increase Revenues?

This paper provides evidence that some cities subject to a statewide tax limit manipulate their mix of productive and administrative services in an attempt to get voters to override the statewide limit. When a statewide limit reduces a city’s budget, one manipulative response is to cut “service” inputs (for example, teachers or uniformed police officers) by a relatively large amount, while cutt...

Strategies for Local Governments to Promote Solar

A variety of strategies and programs can be used by local governments to promote distributed solar installation. These programs or goals can be attempted in tandem or in a stepwise fashion. First, a goal for solar should be set to provide an example of solar installation benefits to the community. Then, solar permitting should be improved to allow for less time and money spent in the permitting...