منطقه ای، هزینه های عمومی و رشد: یک مدل تلطیف برخورد با "دولت های چپاولگر

In this paper, a micro-founded model analyzing the effects of ‘regionalization’ on economic activity is developed. It shows that the spatial division of public competencies can have an impact on the growth rate via the efficiency of governmental choices: initially advantageous for weak levels, decentralization (/reduction of regional size) becomes limited due to the risk of underestimation of the real profitability of public expenditure by local governments (non-internalized cross-border effects). In accordance with the theory, a transversal estimation for a sample of 51 countries for the 1990s establishes a ‘bell-shaped’ relation between indicators of regionalization and the quality of governance.

The territorial organization of the State is a striking element of the complementarities installed between the private logics of accumulation and the public logics of allocation, regulation and redistribution. The question is how, and to what extent, the level of decentralization really favors growth? In order to answer this question, we suggest a theoretical model which analyses the effects of regionalization on the ‘predatory behavior’ of governments, showing a bell-shaped relation between these two variables: initially beneficial for weak levels, the positive effect of regionalization becomes limited due to the risk of underestimation of the profitability of public expenditures by the local governments (non-internalized overflows of the yield of the expenditure) and the deterioration of their ‘bureaucratic efficiency’ (increase in local predations). The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the spatial model and its political division into autonomous regions. Section 3 calculates the equilibrium of the different regional governments, showing the risk of coordination failures between these governments with regard to their level of public spending on regional infrastructure. Section 4 proposes an empirical verification of the main theoretical result. To conclude, we briefly discuss the respective advantages of ‘federalism’ vs. ‘limited regionalization’ as defined in the paper.

Our theoretical model shows that regionalization influences public choices and growth rates. Regionalization—when kept within certain limit—improves accountability of sub-central governments, reducing the extent of predatory behaviors. The empirical study appears to confirm the theory: the relationship between indicators of regionalization and good governance is quadratic, showing for the X-axis a ‘peak’ close to 40–45%. This value could constitute an optimal limit for regionalization. The optimal regionalization calculated in the paper is, nevertheless, nothing more than a palliative destined to reduce the consequences of co-ordination failures between the local governments. On the contrary, another principle of intervention could consist in envisaging a higher institution of co-ordination aimed to eliminating the problem. It is then necessary to imagine a hierarchy of public intervention, associated with a central levy of revenues and, at the same time, a regionalization of expenditure. This would help to preserve the advantages of decentralization, reflected in the increasing part of the curves shown earlier (proximity effect), without suffering any disadvantages (the decreasing part of the curves, coordination failures). This institutional framework is interpreted as ‘active federalism’ and implements a real constraining force by the center on the regions upon their public policy. In general, we can give the terms of choice between the two systems: ‘active federalism’ and ‘explosion into autonomous regions’. To compare the rates of growth, the advantage of active federalism can verify the inequality: equation(9) View the MathML source The centralized collection of taxes and the return to an effective control on regional spending allow the extension of the geographical horizon (the limits of the integral from 0 to 1 correspond henceforth to the entire territory): public spending being allocated in proportion to its complete yield. Inequality Eq. (9) is verified for small values of E* (central predation): as long as the rate of central predation remains limited, society as a whole can benefit from federalism, this second level of predation E* being the ‘price to pay’ for the hierarchy—as opposed to a system of regional autonomy. According to this theoretical model, it could be argued that ‘active federalism’ is the best option. However, ‘active federalism’ not only goes against the autonomy of regional governments, but could potentially violate the essence of the federal idea. We must take into account that political as well as historical factors play an important role when dealing with this kind of reform. For that reason, in a lot of countries, the ‘active’ form of federalism is not practiced (with the notable exceptions of China, where the ‘power to tax’ is associated with strong authoritarian control, and perhaps USA…). Limited regionalization as defined earlier on in the paper—i.e. kept within rational bounds—would then appear to be a convenient second-best, when local governments are suspected of being predatory and when they remain not controllable by other methods.