The Impact of Equalization on Service Delivery

Catherine Hull and Bob Searle
Additional contact information
Catherine Hull: Australian Government
Bob Searle: Australian Government

Chapter Chapter 4 in Fiscal Equalization, 2007, pp 61-93 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The founders of the Australian federation recognized the need for transfer payments from the national to state level governments and made provision in the Constitution to achieve that end. Transfers are required to overcome the vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) between the levels of government and also to provide greater financial assistance to some States than to others. The arrangements for providing extra assistance to particular States were first formalized in 1933 with the creation assistance to particular States were first formalized in 1933 with the creation of the Commonwealth Grants Commission (the Commission). In 1936, the Commission (and the Australian Government) took a concept developed earlier by one of its members and decided that grants to the States would be provided on the basis of horizontal fiscal equalization (HFE). However, it was not until the early 1980s that a comprehensive system of HFE was introduced. As a result of this comprehensive system, the Commission has 26 years of data, from 1977–78 to 2002–03, on: i) The revenues and expenses of the States on a largely comparable accounting and classification basis ii) Australian average per capita State revenues and expenses iii) Standardized revenues and expenses of the States iv) The relative revenue raising capacities of the States, and their relative costs of providing Australia average levels of services; and v) The relative revenue raising efforts made by the States, and the relative levels of services they provide.

Keywords: Service Provision; Service Level; Australian State; Fiscal Decentralization; Australian Capital Territory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:sprchp:978-0-387-48988-9_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9780387489889

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-48988-9_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().