Federal Assistance and Local Services in the United States: The Evolution of a New Federalist Fiscal Order

The federalist fiscal structure of the United States has been evolving steadily towards the centralization of the financing of government services and transfers. Revenues are raised centrally and then transferred, via grants-in-aid, to state and local governments. This paper seeks to explain this movement towards centralized financing. Two alternative hypotheses are examined. The first--that aid is allocated to correct market or political failures in the local public economy or to equalize the provision of meritorious local public goods--generally fails to account for the distribution of federal aid over the past thirty years. The second hypothesis--that aid is allocated to ease the fiscal pressure in the state- local sector when, and only when, it is in the political interests of Congressional representatives to do so--is supported by the recent data. Our current system of federal grants to state and local governments is a logical outcome of a Congressional budget process that rewards the centralized financing and the localized provision of public good and services.

The Funding Status of Teacher Pensions: An Econometric Approach

The financing of public employee pensions has become an issue of growing public concern. This paper examines the fundinq status of teacher pension plans for the fifty states and for selected localities for the decade, 1971-1980. A pension underfunding equation based upon actuarial principles is specified and estimated using a sample of pension plans for which actuarially sound measures of underfundings are available. The ecometrically-estimated pension equationis then used to "predict" underfundings for each state and local pension plan for each year for which full pension plan data are available. The results reveal that the real dollar value of plan underfundings has risen by over 50% in the average state from 1971-1980. Strategies for funding these growing pension deficits are required.

The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy

If there has been a dominant trend in the evolution of the modern industrial societies of this century it has been the growing importance of government in the allocation of social resources. It is important that we appreciate the fundamentally political nature of the formation of government economic policy. This survey reviews and assesses our present understanding of how the political system might shape a nation's fiscal policy. Our approach is eclectic, drawing both from economics and political science, and decidedly micro-analytic in its orientation. From economics we adopt the perspective of utility maximizing agents and the analytics of trade, agreement, and market failure. From political science we learn just how and when these individual agents might act collectively to provide public goods, redistribute income, or issue government debt. Together the micro-analytics of economics and political science form the core theory of the 'new' political economy and provide a framework for understanding the emergence, and the performance, of governments. There is no more important test for the new discipline than providing a compelling explanation for the formation of fiscal policy in democratic societies.

Fiscal Federalism in Europe: Lessons From the United States Experience

The existing political and legal institutions of fiscal policy-making are under challenge. As the United States and the eastern European and Soviet states experiment with policy decentralization, the states of western Europe are looking to a more centralized policy structure via the E.E.C.. This paper seeks to raise issues of importance to all such reform efforts--notably, the need to consider, and balance, the inefficiencies of fiscal policy decentralization (spillovers and wasteful fiscal competition) against the inefficiencies of fiscal policy centralization (policy cycles and localized 'pork barrel' spending and taxes). The need to develop new fiscal policy institutions emphasizing voluntary agreements and responsive 'agenda-setters' is stressed.

The U.S. experience shows that union-wide fiscal policies, targeted transfers and lower tax rates may help to stimulate growth at the state and national level

The 2008 Great Recession and slow recovery have created a new interest in a broader fiscal union for the EU. Drawing on the U.S. experience from 1973-2009, Robert P. Inman identifies three key lessons for creating efficient macroeconomic policy in a fiscal union: that state level fiscal policies have spillover effects; central government must pick the most cost effective stimulus policies; and that economic efficiency does not always equate with political feasibility. His findings are particular relevant to the challenge of creating effective stimulus plans and broader growth

Federalism\u27s Values and the Value of Federalism

What is it about federal governance that makes it so attractive to economists, political philosophers and legal scholars and is there any evidence that would suggest all this attention is warranted? Proponents see federalism as a means to more efficient public and private economies, as the foundation for increased political participation and democratic stability and as an important check on governmental abuses of personal rights and liberties. This study provides a working definition of federal governance and classifies a sample of 73 countries as either a constitutionally based federal democracy, an administratively based federal democracy, a unitary democracy, a federal dictatorship or a unitary dictatorship. Governance is then related to 11 measures of economic, democratic, and rights performance. Three conclusions follow. First, decentralized policy-making does have a unique contribution to make to a society\u27s ability to enforce property rights, to protect political and civil rights, and then because of such rights protections, to enhance private sector economic performance. Second, while policy decentralization is the key to federalism\u27s strong rights and economic performance and can be achieved within a unitary government by fiat, constitutionally established provincial (or state) governments provide an extra and important protective barrier for policy decentralization. Federal institutions protect policy decentralization, and policy decentralization provides federalism\u27s valued outcomes. Third, federalism needs democracy; there is no evidence that adding policy decentralization or provinces to a dictatorship significantly improves a dictatorship\u27s economic or rights performance