States in fiscal distress

The 2007-10 recession has imposed significant fiscal hardships on state and local governments. The result has been state budget deficits and the need to increase state taxes, cut spending, and withdraw funds from state “rainy day” accounts. The primary cause of state budget “gaps” has been the rise in the level of state unemployment. There is no evidence that these gaps are related to state political institutions, a state’s prior receipt of federal funding, or possibly favored access to key congressional budget committees. The federal government has responded to these gaps with the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 to aid states in fiscal distress and provide economic stimulus. Though intended as insurance for fiscal distress, ARRA covers at most $0.23 of each dollar of a state’s recession-induced budget gap. These funds are provided through a large per capita payment to each state, independent of any level of state deficit. AARA was also intended as targeted assistance for stimulating local economies, but its funding is uncorrelated with state unemployment rates. ARRA funding appears to be decided by congressional politics, given Congress’s desire to pass a major spending and tax relief package as quickly as possible. States are important “agents” for federal macroeconomic policy, but agents with their own needs and objectives.State finance ; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

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.

Understanding the Democratic Transition in South Africa

South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy stands as one of the past century’s most important political events. The transition has been successful to this point because the new constitution adopted a form of federal governance that has been able to provide protection for the economic elite from maximal redistributive taxation. Appropriately structured, federal governance creates a “hostage game” in which the majority central government controls the tax rate but elite run province(s) control the provision of important redistributive services to a significant fraction of lower income households. At least to today, the political economy of South Africa has found a stable equilibrium with less than maximal redistributive taxation. Moreover, the move to a democratic federalist system has improved the economic welfare of both the white minority and the black majority. Whether the federal structure can continue to check maximal taxation depends crucially upon the rate of time preference of the majority and their demands for redistributive public services. A new, impatient and more radical majority (ANC) party threatens the current equilibrium.

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.

Central Policies for Local Debt: The Case of Teacher Pensions

The recent debt crises in New York City and Cleveland, the deterioration of public infra-structures in certain of our states and larger cities, and the occasional bankruptcy of smaller pension plans suggest that not all of local finance stands on a sound fiscal base. This paper examines the trends in funding for one form of state and local government debt--teacher pensions underfundings -- and asks what a central government might do to check any unwanted growth in these liabilities. The analysis concludes (i) that this form of state-local debt is sizeable and growing, (ii) that state and local governments have an implicit pay-as-you-go bias in pension financing which encourages the growth of debt, but (iii) central government benefit and funding regulations or debt relief policies can slow, or even reverse, that growth.

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