Elections and de facto Expenditure Decentralization in Canada

Mario Jametti () and Marcelin Joanis

CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of expenditure decentralization, based on the predictions of a new political economy model of partial decentralization. The analysis is based on an agency model, in which two levels of government are involved in the provision of a public good and voters are imperfectly informed about each government's contribution to the good, creating a shared accountability problem. Under shared expenditure responsibility, the degree of decentralization is endogenous and depends on the relative political conditions prevailing at each level of government. Consistent with the model's predictions, empirical results from a panel of Canadian provinces show that decentralization in a province increases with the electoral strength of the provincial government and decreases with the electoral strength of the federal government, in addition to being affected significantly by the partisan affiliation of both levels of government. A series of alternative empirical specifications, including an IV regression exploiting campaign spending data, are presented to assess the robustness of these results.

Keywords: Fiscal decentralization; fiscal federalism; vertical interactions; partial decentralization; elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cirano.qc.ca/files/publications/2014s-28.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Elections and de facto expenditure decentralization in Canada (2020)
Working Paper: Elections and de facto Expenditure Decentralization in Canada (2014)
Working Paper: Elections and de facto Expenditure Decentralization in Canada (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cir:cirwor:2014s-28

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIRANO Working Papers from CIRANO Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Webmaster ().