Shadow Budgets, Fiscal Illusion and Municipal Spending: The Case of Germany

Peter Haug

No 9/2009, IWH Discussion Papers from Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH)

Abstract: The paper investigates the existence of fiscal illusion in German municipalities with special focus on the revenues from local public enterprises. These shadow budgets tend to increase the misperception of municipal tax prices and seem to have been neglected in the literature. Therefore, an aggregated expenditure function has been estimated for all German independent cities applying an "integrated budget" approach, which means that revenues and expenditures of the core budget and the local public enterprises are combined to one single municipal budget. The estimation results suggest that a higher relative share of local public enterprise revenues might increase total per capita spending as well as spending for nonobligatory municipal goods and services. Empirical evidence for other sources of fiscal illusion is mixed but some indications for debt illusion, renter illusion or the flypaper effect could be found.

Keywords: fiscal illusion; municipal enterprises; panel data regression; Fiskalillusion; Kommunale Unternehmen; Paneldatenregression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H71 H72 L32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/29990/1/600760642.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:iwhdps:iwh-9-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IWH Discussion Papers from Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().