A New Revenue Sharing Act and a New Stability Pact for Austria – No Fundamental Changes
The new Austrian domestic Stability Pact aims at the achievement of a zero deficit until 2008. At the federal level, the Maastricht-relevant deficit is to be reduced to 0.75 percent of GDP, states and municipalities together are obliged to obtain a surplus of 0.75 percent of GDP in 2008. The new revenue sharing agreement will not change fiscal relations fundamentally. The weight of shared federal taxes will increase; most of them will be distributed according to uniform revenue shares. The revenues of the smallest municipalities from the horizontal apportionment of shared federal taxes will increase. The states' strong dependency on intergovernmental transfers will not be reduced, the tax autonomy of the subnational levels of government will remain low.
Fiscal Relations across Government Levels
Despite its apparent advantages, devolution of fiscal responsibilities has not proceeded evenly over the past two decades. Decentralisation can strengthen the democratic process, allow governments to tailor the supply of public goods to local preferences and introduce some competition across jurisdictions, thus raising public sector efficiency. It can, however, entail efficiency losses and make it difficult to implement redistributive policies. On the spending side, local provision may fail to exploit economies of scale and internalise territorial spillovers – a serious issue since few public goods are purely local by nature. On the revenue side, few tax bases can be exploited by sub-national governments without risking making national objectives difficult to achieve and raising serious distributive concerns. This paper, which is largely based on country experiences in mitigating the potential drawbacks of decentralisation while obtaining most of its benefits, provides a framework for assessing fiscal relations across levels of government...
Enhancing the Effectiveness of Public Expenditure in Sweden
This paper analyses the main features of Sweden’s public expenditure and addresses some key policy issues. Public spending is high relative to GDP, reflecting the wide support for the Swedish welfare state. The institutional framework within which spending decisions are made has both strengths and weaknesses: the expenditure ceilings need to be reinforced, more prioritisation of expenditure is needed, and state agencies need to become more accountable for their performance. Outlays and outcomes are examined for childcare and education, health, caring for the elderly, and social insurance, where some aspects function very well and others need considerable improvement. Some tools and techniques for getting better results from public spending are also considered, including contracting out and user charges. More could be done to clearly set out the costs as well as the benefits of social choices ... Ameliorer l'efficacite des depenses publiques en Suede Ce document analyse les principales caracteristiques des depenses publiques de la Suede et aborde quelques questions politiques determinantes. La part des depenses publiques dans le PIB est importante et traduit le large soutient dont jouit l’Etat providence en Suede. Le cadre institutionnel dans lequel sont prises les decisions concernant les depenses publiques possede des points forts et des faiblesses : les plafonds des depenses ont besoin d’etre renforces, l’ordre des priorites necessite d’etre mieux etabli, et les organismes publics doivent plus etre tenus pour responsables de leurs resultats. Les depenses et les resultats sont examines dans les domaines de la garde des enfants et de l’education, de la sante, du soin des personnes âgees et de l’assurance sociale, dont certains aspects fonctionnent tres bien et d’autres exigent des ameliorations considerables. En vue de l’obtention de meilleurs resultats, certains outils et techniques, tels que la sous-traitance et les ...