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In this article we analyze preferences for tax schemes, using data on subjective evaluations of the taxes paid by different income groups. We estimate multilevel models to test the effect of socio-economic status and political ideology on individual preferences. We find that both self-interest motivations and political ideology are important factors in explaining preferences for tax schemes. At the national level, it is found that the fiscal burden shapes preferences for tax schemes (especially direct taxation) and it has an interacting effect with both self-interest and ideological variables. At higher levels of direct taxation, probabilities of supporting redistribution toward the poor and the rich become highly polarized along political affiliations. This suggests a mobilization effect. As direct taxation increases, left-wing parties strengthen their ability to mobilize their electorates to pursue further their redistributive interests, while right-wing voters increase their resistance to taxing the rich.

While there is an extensive list of publications to explain fiscal decentralization across countries and over time, with this being defined as the share of all subnational government expenditure compared with that of the general government, a vacuum still exists when it comes to a similar analysis for the separate functions of the state. This research addresses that challenge by estimating an empirical model that explains the fiscal decentralization of six specific public goods. Since the data available from the International Monetary Fund, as well as from other sources, are incomplete, an imputation procedure is conducted in order to produce a balanced panel of forty-four countries. As opposed to studies based on subnational expenditure as a whole, our results suggest that, generally, fiscal decentralization does not exhibit the same pattern across specific government functions. This entails important policy lessons, as it suggests that fiscal decentralization should not be seen as an all-across-the-board strategy to modernize the state.

This paper analyzes whether fiscal decentralization of education, health, housing, social protection, recreation, culture and religion, public order and safety, and transportation have a significant effect on individual well-being. The empirical analysis is based on a non-linear hierarchical model that combines individual data (level 1) with country-level data (level 2). We match 89,584 observations from the World Value Service and the European Value Service (various years) with the average value of data recorded for 30 countries by the Government Financial Statistics (IMF). While fiscal decentralization in education and housing appears to have a negative effect on well-being, this effect is positive in the cases of health and culture and recreation. We interpret this as evidence in favor of a “selective” decentralization approach.

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Background: Poverty remains one of the major international challenges as reflected in the commitments adopted by the United Nations in the 2030 Agenda. In order to fight against it, international development agencies have fostered decentralization reforms that have been applied throughout the world. This means that, the analysis of the effects of fiscal decentralization on poverty has become a research area of extraordinary academic interest, but one that has produced conflicting findings. This paper aims to analyse the effect on poverty of fiscal decentralization of spending in education, health, housing, and social protection. Methods: We estimate a fixed effect model by Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) using unbalanced panel data of countries. Results: The decentralization of spending has a differentiated effect on poverty: the decentralization of health and housing policies contributes to reduce poverty,

International organisations assert that political corruption is a major global problem. However, it is still unclear how to combat corruption. Previous research has studied corruption in central or local governments, rarely in regional ones. In this paper, we aim to identify factors influencing political corruption in regional governments. Using panel data, we analyse the statistical association between 29 economic, financial, political and socioeconomic variables and the corruption perceived by citizens, from January 2006 to September 2019. The results reveal that perceived political corruption is affected by government spending and ideological distance, among other factors. We propose several measures to reduce political corruption. Points for practitioners The study has found that political corruption needs to be combatted through different measures for each administrative level. Our results support the idea that the following variables influence the perceived level of corruption within the regional governments: the volume of government borrowing, the ideological distance between the voter and the government, the percentage electoral participation and the volume of dependent and immigrant population of the region. Likewise, we also confirm that regional governments with higher values on the Quality of Government Index are perceived as less corrupt.

RESUMENDesde que en 1931 Tibbits publicó un estudio sobre la relación entre el ciclo económico y los resultados electorales, el análisis del voto económico ha ido perfilando una teoría que explica la decisión de los electores. A diferencia de otras investigaciones, en este artículo se plantea un modelo de voto económico en el que suponemos que los electores son racionales, neutrales ante el riesgo y poseen incertidumbre ante la situación económica prospectiva del país. El objetivo último del elector es votar por el candidato que le permita maximizar la utilidad esperada de su decisión. De las estimaciones realizadas a partir de la matriz de microdatos agrupados de las elecciones presidenciales celebradas en Chile en 1993Chile en , 1999Chile en -2000Chile en y 2005Chile en -2006, se concluye que el liderazgo y el contexto electoral son los factores que más condicionan el comportamiento de los electores. También comprobamos que el voto económico de los chilenos es sofisticado, racional y heterogéneo.