تمرکز زدایی مالی در مناطق رانتخوار: مدارک و شواهد از روسیه

The paper argues that governments in regions that rely heavily on intergovernmental transfers and natural resource rents face serious distortions in their incentive structure. As a result, such regions tend to have more fiscally centralized governments than the regional characteristics would suggest. Data on Russian regions in the late 1990s—early 2000s support this hypothesis. Advancing intraregional fiscal decentralization in rentier regions could reduce policy distortions, and make the subnational environment more supportive of economic development.

It has been widely suggested that fiscal decentralization can be beneficial for development if subnational governments are provided with appropriate incentives to extend their tax base and foster economic growth (e.g., Qian & Weingast, 1997). However, for this mechanism to work, subnational government revenue must be sufficiently sensitive to changes in the local tax base (Plekhanov, 2004). Desai, Freinkman, and Goldberg (2005) pointed out that this condition is not met in rentier regions, that is, regions that derive a major part of their revenue from exogenously determined or externally generated rents. Such rents most commonly take the form of intergovernmental transfers and revenues from the extraction of mineral resources. Desai et al. (2005) showed that, in contrast to rent-free regions, expansion in fiscal autonomy in rentier regions does not result in higher rates of economic growth and development but appears to slow down reforms, investment, and growth. This paper extends the analysis of asymmetric outcomes of fiscal decentralization in the case of rentier versus non-rentier regions by noting that the distortion of fiscal incentives in rentier regions can also result in excessive centralization of regional government spending. That is, the structure of regional budget expenditure in such regions is more centralized than the regional measures of demand for fiscal decentralization would suggest. The panel data on Russian regions in 1996–2001 support this hypothesis.

It has been widely suggested that devolution of fiscal autonomy to regions can strengthen subnational governments’ incentives to improve the business climate, promote reform, and foster economic growth, leading to improved development outcomes. However, if regions derive a major share of their revenue from external and/or exogenous sources, such as federal transfers or natural resource rents, decentralization may distort rather than improve fiscal incentives. Reliance on rents may concentrate political and economic power in the hands of regional elite groups, diminish relative returns to investment in business climate improvements, infrastructure, and human capital insufficient to justify them, raise the opportunity costs of reforms, and dampen the disciplining effect of interregional competition between the governments. Given these distorted incentives, delegation of fiscal autonomy to rentier regions is likely to produce inferior development outcomes. Desai et al. (2005) proposed an asymmetrical federalism solution to this problem, whereby the fiscal autonomy of resource-rich and transfer-dependent regions should be limited, while other regions can enjoy higher degrees of fiscal autonomy. This approach, however, relies on the ability of the federal government to take over the micromanagement of many aspects of regional public finance without significant efficiency losses. Such losses may arise both due to asymmetric information about the demand for specific projects and their costs and due to the lack of accountability of centrally appointed bureaucrats to local voters. This paper suggests an alternative strategy to address the problem of distorted fiscal incentives in rentier regions: additional delegation of responsibilities from the regional to the municipal governments to advance fiscal decentralization within such regions. This suggestion is justified by the paper’s finding that the rentier regions’ budgets are over-centralized.