How does revenue diversification shape the budgetary solvency of city governments? Previous studies informed by public choice/fiscal illusion perspective suggest that leads to unsustainable government expansion and imbalance. In contrast, organizational adaptation/modern portfolio theory suggests enables prepare for external fiscal shocks. We use different measures rely on audited financial inf...

Our work in the Czech Republic and in FYR Macedonia demonstrates the importance of including contingent liabilities when assessing the magnitude of the true fiscal adjustment, and when analyzing fiscal sustainability. To the extent that explicit expenditures are shifted off-budget or replaced by the issuance of guarantees, the achieved improvement in fiscal balances is overstated. For the Czech...

What determines government spending in South Africa? The paper estimates the determinants of real per capita government spending in the Republic of South Africa, using annual data for the period 1960 to 2007, a tumultuous period during which South Africa experienced a variety of internally imposed changes (e.g., the abolition of apartheid, changes in political institutions) and externally gener...

Choice blindness is the experimental finding that people may miss changes to the outcome of their actions. This effect has been demonstrated in decision tasks concerning attractiveness of faces, as well as smell and taste of different consumer products. But so far, choice blindness experiments have only been done in the “physical” world, using real objects like photographs. Here we extend this ...

background fiscal decentralization (fd) in many cases is encouraged as a strong means of improving the efficiency and equity in the provision of public goods, such as healthcare services. this issue has urged the researchers to experimentally examine the relationship between fiscal decentralization indicators and health outcomes. in this study we examine the effect of fiscal decentralization in...

Although the local provision of public goods accommodates better to heterogeneous preferences and mitigates fiscal illusion problem, it comes at cost potential diseconomies scale. This paper examines relationship between municipal size service level by applying state-of-the-art non-parametric techniques a unique panel dataset Flemish data. We measure using an innovative robust conditional ‘Bene...