La contrainte de budget des collectivités locales françaises est-elle relâchée ?

Alain Guengant and Jean-Michel Josselin ()

Revue d'économie régionale et urbaine, 2009, vol. novembre, issue 4, 739-758

Abstract: Fiscal relief of local governments by the central authorities has become a subject of major concern in the political economy of multi-level governments. Generally studied in federations, fiscally irresponsible behaviors are endogenous to the system of financial relations amongst levels of government. This system may allow local governments to strategically constrain the central government to bail them out. The present contribution provides a case study of a unitary but decentralized state, namely France. It shows that the usual debt channel of the soft budget constraint is not relevant here. However, the ill designed system of local taxation has been resulting over the years in an increasing burden on local taxpayers which is partially relieved by the central government. Local governments may strategically anticipate such relieves with ?first mover? increases in their tax pressure.

Keywords: soft budget constraint; unitary government; local governments; French municipalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=RERU_094_0739 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-regionale-et-urbaine-2009-4-page-739.htm (text/html)
free

Related works:
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:cai:rerarc:reru_094_0739

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue d'économie régionale et urbaine from Armand Colin
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().