Fiscal Powers to Subnational Governments (Gomes)

Fiscal powers to subnational governments: reassessing the concept of fiscal autonomy by Sandra Gomes. “Fiscal autonomy is understood as a type of funding arrangement that awards subnational governments more discretion over the allocation of funds and, therefore, the choice of public policies. From this concept a series of expected (positive and negative) effects on local governance is predicted by theories. However, the adopted assumption that once local governments have autonomous sources of revenue, they will necessarily have autonomy on the spending-side is false and leads to misleading conclusions…Results are strikingly different and, it is argued, are not a simple matter of classification but indeed of theoretical validity.”  PDF Attached