Cifuentes-Faura, Javier, Fülöp, Melinda Timea and Topor, Dan Ioan
Financial autonomy in Spanish local governments: Empirical evidence of beta and sigma convergence
- International Review of Administrative Sciences
- 90(3), Sep, 2024: p.599-614
Territorially, Spanish public administrations are organized into State Administration, Autonomous Community Administration, and Local Administration. Local government has the closest contact with citizens and therefore the powers and decisions taken by local institutions have the greatest impact on the social welfare of citizens. To ensure this well-being, it is necessary to analyze and pay attention to the administrative and financial autonomy of local governments. Financial autonomy translates into the capacity of local entities to govern their respective finances, determining, within certain limits, the level of the volume of their own resources and organizing their expenditures. In this work, we study the Financial Autonomy Indicator, which aims to determine the tax resources available to the local entity. Taking into account that Spanish municipalities have, depending on their population size, different obligations when providing services to citizens, the convergence of financial autonomy is studied to detect whether there are common trends by applying the techniques of β-convergence and σ-convergence. It is analyzed whether municipalities starting from lower indicators achieve higher growth over time (β-convergence), and whether dispersion between municipalities is reduced (σ-convergence).- Reproduced