On The Effects of Local Versus Central Government Financing of Local Services
This paper provides some empirical support for pricing a part of local services on user basis. A model of fiscal responses to grants/user fees, based on a vote-maximizing approach, is tested on both time series and pooled data (1977-1991) for 39 upper-tier municipalities in Ontario, Canada. The exogeneity specification of grants is tested and the test results are taken into account in estimating the model. The results indicate that roughly 70 percent of the municipal governments would find it cheaper to finance local spending by grants than by local taxation. If the grant system is abolished, a majority of these governments would prefer to use some sort of user fees in financing local services. The study suggests that local public services can be provided at a substantially lower per-unit cost if some selected services are priced on user basis.
Resource Fungibility, the Flypaper Effect, and the Expenditure Impact of Grants-in-Aid
The typical assumption that intergovernmental grants-in-aid alter a recipient's budget constraint according to the legal provisions of grant programs was first challenged by McGuire (1975, 1978) in a model where local officials are able to convert some fraction of conditional aid into pure fungible resources. This paper develops a model of local government expenditure decisions based on McGuire's original work and applies it to data for large U.S. city governments. The results lend strong support to the fungibility hypothesis. Additionally, and importantly, the results provide very little evidence in support of the so-called "flypaper effect" of unconditional grants. This is due to a more appropriate specification of the unconditional aid variable.
Growth from Solutions
Growth from solutions is the crystallization of a compound whose chemical composition differs markedly from that of the initial liquid phase. Commonly used solvents are water, multicomponent aqueous or nonaqueous solutions, and melts of some chemical compounds. Differentiations are made based on growth temperatures and on the chemical nature of the solvent. In growth from low-temperature aqueous solutions, the temperatures generally do not exceed 80–90°C; in growth from superheated aqueous solutions (hydrothermal method), they reach 800°C, and in growth from salt melts (molten-salt, flux, or fluxed melt growth), they usually do not exceed 1200–1300°C, but sometimes reach 1500°C.