This paper examines the Granger-causality between total expenditures, own source revenues, grants received from state and long term loans for 12 subgroups of Finnish municipalities. Two panel data sets that cover the years 1985-1992 and 1993-1999 are used in order to compare the effect of change from matching grants to formula based grants system. The main findings are that the grant system reform has resulted in more careful economic decision-making among the municipalities. For instance, the largest municipalities that used to have “spend and tax” causality now have “simultaneous” causality between expenditures and revenues. Another finding is that the smallest municipalities seem to be careful in their budgetary process irrespective of the grant system. The implications of the results are that the reaction to specific central state measures may differ considerably between separate groups of municipalities. The differences should be taken into account before making any important changes or restrictions that affect municipalities’ budgetary variables.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by European Regional Science Association in its series ERSA conference papers with number
ersa01p170.
Length: Date of creation: Aug 2001 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa01p170
Contact details of provider: Postal: Augasse 2-6, 1090 Vienna, Austria Web page: http://www.ersa.org
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Gunther Maier).
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: