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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