Reassignment and the Power to Tax in a Federal State: Canada, 1867-2024

L. Winter Stanley and Stanley Winer ()

No 11678, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Although reassignment of policy instruments among governments in many federations is a recurring event, there is no widely accepted, positive model of the phenomenon. This stands in contrast to the well established body of work on the normative theory of the efficient federal assignment. In this paper, I study reassignment of the power to tax in the Canadian federation by considering three elements that are likely to be part of any complete, positive analysis. These are: the facts that characterize the fiscal history of reassignment in the Canadian federation; the logic behind the demand for tax and other instruments by provincial and national governments; and the analysis of intergovernmental trade in governing instruments, which adds the supply of instruments and closes the model. While the story I tell is constructed to deal with the Canadian case, I hope that some of the ideas and issues I raise will generalize.

Keywords: federal constitution; reassignment; demand and supply of governing instruments; power to tax; political competition; fiscal history; Canadian fiscal federalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H10 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pub
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Working Paper: Reassignment and the Power to Tax in a Federal State: Canada, 1867-2024 (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11678

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