EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Changing State Fiscal Capacity and Tax Effort in an Era of Devolving Government, 1981-2003

John Mikesell

Publius: The Journal of Federalism, vol. 37, issue 4, 532-550

Abstract: The American system of fiscal federalism requires that state and local governments finance the bulk of their budgets from own-source revenues, not transfers. This article analyzes state total taxable resources from 1981 to 2003 to evaluate how state fiscal capacity has changed in that time and how it has been affected by national recessions, to examine the extent to which fiscal capacity differs among states and whether capacity has converged, and to consider whether states have responded to service demands by changing tax effort and whether tax effort has converged in the face of interstate competition and other harmonizing forces. Because the capacity measure employed here can be compared across years, something impossible with major alternative indices, the analysis provides insights important to the analysis of fiscal federalism and of the implications of revenue devolution not previously possible. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pjm016 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:publus:v:37:y::i:4:p:532-550

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Publius: The Journal of Federalism is currently edited by Paul Nolette and Philip Rocco

More articles in Publius: The Journal of Federalism from CSF Associates Inc. Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:37:y::i:4:p:532-550