نسل دوم فدرالیسم مالی : جنبه های سیاسی عدم تمرکز و توسعه اقتصادی

This essay contributes to second generation fiscal federalism (SGFF), which traces the implications of incentives created by political and fiscal institutions. The approach explores how various forms of fiscal federalism work in the presence of political officials who, rather than being benevolent social planners, face various forms of political incentives. The paper focuses on three sets of positive models: First, it explores self-enforcing federalism; that is, how federal systems are held together given various tendencies for federal systems to become centralized or fall apart. Second, it considers how specific political institutions, such as democracy, interact with decentralization. Finally, it studies various political impediments to economic growth, again highlighting the interaction with decentralization.

Traditional approaches to fiscal federalism typically make a series of implicit political assumptions that limit its applicability as a positive model. For this reason, the literature distinguishes between two approaches to fiscal federalism. First generation fiscal federalism (FGFF) studies the performance of decentralized systems under the assumption of benevolent social planners. Second generation fiscal federalism (SGFF) builds on FGFF but also studies the fiscal and political incentives facing subnational officials.1 The FGFF assumption of benevolent maximizers of social welfare ignores the actual goals of political officials who typically must run for election. This perspective also ignores the problem of how federal systems remain stable given the incentives of officials at the different levels to cheat on the rules; for example, by encroaching on power and prerogatives of another level. Students of SGFF study how behavior within real political institutions, such as democracy, interacts with federal institutions

This essay surveys a range of new SGFF research, focusing on a set of related topics involving political decentralization. The hallmark of second generation models is that they trace the implications of incentives created by political and fiscal institutions. This work provides a series of natural extensions of first generation models. FGFF models assume policy choice by benevolent social planners. The normative component of SGFF models studies how to devise political and fiscal institutions to align the incentives of political officials with citizens so as to approximate the FGFF idea. This paper uses SGFF approaches to study several related questions involving the political economy of fiscal federalism relevant for traditional issues in fiscal federalism. How do various forms of fiscal federalism work in the presence of political officials who, rather than being benevolent social planners, face various forms of political incentives?