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China’s regions have been experiencing impressive growth over the past decades, but their potentials could be better exploited by creating a single product and labour market. Local protectionism increases transaction costs and hinders competition, thereby taking a toll on productivity. Administrative monopolies have long thrived and are hard to dismantle. Restrictions on the hukou and the fragmented pension system limit labour mobility. Local regulations aim at, among other things, securing the collection of local taxes, without which cities could not afford to offer the same public services to migrants as to urbanites. Hence, dismantling local regulations and creating a single product and labour market needs to go hand-in-hand with the reform of inter-governmental finances. Recent measures on both the product and labour market front appear to aim at making up for the slow progress over the past decade or so. There are signs that these efforts are helping China’s regions at various levels to converge toward each other. Disparities are shrinking faster across provinces, compared to within provinces. Integration of product and labour markets will boost productivity over the medium-to long term by reducing transaction costs, but could potentially widen regional disparities, which are already relatively high. This will necessitate enhanced transfers and re-centralisation of the financing of spending in some key categories such as education and health. Policies to help catching up of laggard regions by better connectivity through infrastructure investment are bearing fruit, but such investments should be subject to rigorous cost-benefit criteria to enhance capital allocation efficiency and should take into account externalities. Notwithstanding significant disparities along multiple dimensions across provinces, inequalities, be it in terms of income, wealth or education, are actually most striking along the rural-urban dimension. The rural revitalisation strategy, a novel element of the 19th Party Congress outcomes, is expected to address this issue. The other recent strategy of nurturing the formation of city groups will also likely benefit rural areas in-between those cities.This Working Paper relates to the 2019 OECD Economic Survey of China (http://www.oecd.org/economy/china-economic-snapshot/).

Over the years, fiscal federalism has been a dominant and contentious issue in Nigeria. The country’s chequered political history has affected the practice of federalism and this has in turn affected the performance and service delivery, especially at the local government level. This study assesses the effect of the existing fiscal relations on service delivery in the local government areas from 1999-2019. It adopts a descriptive design survey and relies on primary and secondary sources for data collection. The findings reveal that fiscal relations have not improved the performance in critical areas of services at the local government level. It concludes that the sub-national government has muscled out the local government through its institutions that manage the joint commissions and other political machinery. The study recommends financial and administrative restructuring that will guarantee an appreciable level of financial autonomy for the local government to be able to fulfill its constitutionally assigned responsibilities.

International Organizations and Member State Responsibility: Critical Perspectives compiles novel approaches within academia and legal practice that reflect the evolution of the contemporary law of international (member state) responsibility. This Volume was previously published as International Organizations Law Review Vol. 12, issue 2 (2015).

The main objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between the fiscal performance of the state governments in Malaysia with the political and institutional environment within which they evolve. The focus of our analysis is the inter-governmental transfer system which constitutes an essential part of any inter-governmental and decentralised system. More particularly, we analysed the impact of federal grants on state governments' fiscal efficiency. Indeed, the general observation of a continuous deterioration in the financial situation in Malaysia bring us to question if the state governments are making sufficient efforts to exploit all the revenue sources that are in their hands. And one may wonder if the inter-governmental grants system is one of the causes of state governments slackening in their tax efforts. Fiscal effort is measured by the amount of taxes collected by the state government and the impact of federal grants on fiscal efforts is assessed by using the stochastic frontier analysis methodology. The advantage of using this method is that it allows us to obtain estimates of both efficiency level as well as the determinants of the efficiency level. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The Malaysian Federalism is highly centralized in terms of revenue powers, expenditure responsibilities and borrowing powers. Interpreting from the Federal-State fiscal relationship, decentralization is a non-issue in the Malaysian Federalism context. The Federal Government had a very strong commitment in the economic development and transformation of the States. In fact, the Federal government is better positioned to manage social and economic agendas with the good effect of scale economy. Federal-State fiscal relations have however been affected by the problems of both vertical (Federal-State) and horizontal imbalances (State-State). This is however warranted by negotiations with the State in concerned by directing Federal sponsored development projects, transfer of financial resources (grants and loans) to the States and the setting up National Finance Council (NFC). The issue of fiscal decentralization in the future is likely to be, at best, a series of ad hoc changes and improvements in technical aspects of intergovernmental relationships for public service provisions and their finance.