Welfare reform and state budgets

Welfare ; State finance ; Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996

The debate on Internet sales taxation

Internet ; Taxation

Community-driven sanitation improvement in deprived urban neighbourhoods: meeting the challenges of local collective action, co-production, affordability and a trans-sectoral approach.

There is an international consensus that urban sanitary conditions are in great need of improvement, but sharp disagreement over how this improvement should be pursued. Both market-driven and state-led efforts to improve sanitation in deprived communities tend to be severely compromised, as there is a lack of effective market demand (due to collective action problems) and severe barriers to the centralized provision of low-cost sanitation facilities. In principle, community-driven initiatives have a number of advantages. But community-driven sanitary improvement also faces serious challenges, including: 1) The collective action challenge of getting local residents to coordinate and combine their demands for sanitary improvement; 2) The co-production challenge of getting the state to accept community-driven approaches to sanitary improvement, and where necessary to co-invest and take responsibility for the final waste disposal; 3) The affordability challenge of finding improvements that are affordable and acceptable to both the state and the community – and to other funders if relevant; 4) The trans-sectoral challenge of ensuring that other poverty-related problems, such as insecure tenure, do not undermine efforts to improve sanitation. Each of these challenges is analysed in some detail in the pages that follow. The report then goes on to examine two community-driven approaches to urban sanitation improvement that have been expanding for more than two decades, one in Pakistan and the other in India. It is argued that a large part of their success lies in the manner in which they have met and overcome the aforementioned challenges. Indeed, both overcame the co-production challenge to the point where sanitary improvement became the basis for attempts to radically improve community–government relations – relations unfortunately also very dependent on other political dynamics. They also systematically tackled other, less institutionally-rooted challenges, such as the lack of local technical skills in building and maintaining improved sanitary facilities

Returns to Education for the Marginal Learner: Evidence from the BCS70

Education

Unprepared for boom or bust: understanding the current state fiscal crisis

The headlines concerning state government finances have become increasingly alarming since mid-2001. This article discusses the roots of the current state fiscal crisis by looking at the decisions made by state government leaders during the long expansion. The author suggests increased use of rainy day funds as a way to avoid future crisis.Fiscal policy ; Expenditures, Public ; Federal Reserve District, 7th

Food inflation and the consumption patterns of U.S. households

In July 2008, food prices were 6.0% above their July 2007 level. This article examines how different household types have been affected by the recent rapid rise in food prices.Food prices ; Consumer goods ; Households ; Households - Economic aspects

ASSESSING THE RESEARCH FRAMEWORK AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY

The economic context for rural development has changed markedly since the 1970s. While natural resource industries have continued to decline in importance as rural employers, the internationalization of markets, reorganization of industries, new production technologies, and the rapid development of new information technologies have eroded the competitive position of many rural areas with respect to other industries. In the South, as well as in the rest of the country, the critical rural issue for the 1990s is whether rural areas will be able to find niches to replace those they lost in the 1980s. Thus far, the new economy has been primarily an urban economy, and most rural areas have been left out. This has serious implications for rural development policy.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

On the relationship between mobility, population growth, and capital spending in the United States

In this paper, we assess the empirical relationship between population growth, mobility, and state-level capital spending in the United States. To evaluate the magnitude of the coefficients, we introduce an explicit, quantitative political-economy model of government spending determination, where mobility and population growth generate departures from Ricardian equivalence. Our estimates find strong responses in the level of capital provision per capita to these demographic movements; in fact, the resulting coefficients are stronger than the model delivers. Regression coefficients on population growth and mobility also yield opposite implications for the direction to which spending is distorted by the political-economy friction, posing a further challenge.

The effect of sales tax holidays on household consumption patterns

Sales tax holidays (STHs) are the temporary suspension of state (and some local) sales taxes on selected retail items for a brief period of time. The policy has gained popularity in recent years, beginning in one state in 1997 and growing to twenty by 2008. Despite the increased frequency with which states use STHs, little research has been conducted to study how households respond to this temporary tax manipulation. Our paper offers the first household-level, microeconometric evaluation on the effect of STHs on household consumption patterns. We find that on STHs, households increase the number of clothing and shoes bought by over 49 percent and 45 percent, respectively, relative to what they buy on average. Further, we find that this increase in consumption is limited to children’s apparel and that the wealthiest households and households consisting of married parents and young children have the largest, statistically significant response to STHs; for example, households with incomes over $70,000 increase the number of children’s clothing items purchased by 136 percent, while households that consist of married parents and young children increase the amount spent on children’s clothing and shoes by 117 percent and 295 percent, respectively.Consumption (Economics) ; Households - Finance ; Sales tax