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According to the World Bank, over 80 countries currently plan some form of fiscal decentralization. This group includes Japan, a highly centralized tax state, which in 1995 put in place a law and associated high-profile institutions to promote fiscal and administrative decentralization. But the process in Japan has quickly become bogged down. This dissertation asks why there are hurdles confronting fiscal decentralization in Japan. My research uses the fiscal sociology approach and highlights bureaucratic interests in Japan's intergovernmental tax regime, one that is especially interesting in comparison with other advanced industrial countries. Fully 70 percent of all government spending in Japan is done by subnational levels of government, and 51 percent of the central state's current operating expenditures are transfers downward that serve to support that high rate of local spending. And though Japan is a centralized state, over a third of its taxation is collected locallly. In consequence, Japan is quite anomalous when set alongside a representrative sample of federal and unitary states. No other country among the nine OECD nations used, for comparative purposes, in this dissertation combines such high fiscal transfers with heavy levels of subnational spending and taxation. And no other country gives close control over a large terrain of subnational taxation to a central-state agency (the Ministry of Home Affairs). The ministry's vast bureaucratic turf brings it into conflict with the Ministry of Finance, as both seek to maintain or expand their fiscal jurisdiction. They are thus not interested in fiscal decentralization in large part because they are busy fighting "trench wars" with each other on these tax fields. This dissertation hence undertakes a detailed analysis of intergovernmental fiscal history in Japan, focusing in particular on the Ministry of Home Affairs' ambiguous role in the Japanese state. The case studies of inter-bureaucratic fiscal politics include the Local Allocation Tax (a large general subsidy) as well as an array of taxes on the fields of income, assets and consumption. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

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Regional economics addresses a number of major tasks related to regional and local area development issues such as the planning of investment (private and public), the provision of public goods, urban redevelopment schemes, fiscal and financial relations among various levels of government and subsidy and area development programs. These issues are often surrounded by a sense of urgency stemming in part from the strong spirit of development in many communities and the rising awareness of regional disparity. Yet, the lack of adequate information on subnational economies has traditionally hampered efforts at analyzing many of these issues and at providing adequate choices for decision making.</p> <p>The inadequacy of statistical data at the regional level seldom means, however, a complete lack of information. The available statistical and administrative data are usually prepared by a variety of government agencies and sources for different purposes and, consequently, lack a coherent or systematic framework which relates them meaningfully to each other and to data on the total economy. There is, thus, an obvious need to integrate these data sets with each other and with information on the economy as a whole in order to enhance their usefulness for analysis and decision making at the regional level.</p> <p>It is maintained in this dissertation that a system of economic accounts provides a suitable framework for the integration and systematic treatment of available regional microdata. The application of economic accounting to various types of regional information can give rise to a complete set of regional economic accounts useful for economic analysis at the regional level. This has been demonstrated by designing a system of regional accounts - based on national (provincial) accounting concepts - to Ontario and by estimating the accounting entries for each of its 10 economic regions. The estimation of regional entries is accomplished by a disaggregation or apportionment of the Ontario Accounts totals in the year of estimate (1971) on the basis of various allocation techniques and by using the microdata sets available at the industry and regional levels as allocators.</p> <p>The systematic integration of fragmented regional data by means of an economic accounting framework produces consistency, comprehensiveness and comparability of economic data among the regions and between them and the total economy. It is hoped that economic accounting in Ontario at the regional level will increasingly become recognized as a flexible tool of analysis which can generate a useful interaction between data and method thereby improving both theory and empirical results. The principal achievement has been to highlight areas of weakness in constructing regional economic accounts. It is also hoped that it can serve as a benchmark in future research efforts.</p> <p>The set of regional accounts for Ontario derived in this study was utilized in the context of a regional macro model (based on aggregate demand and supply) for the purpose of calculating a set of regional income multipliers. The multipliers based on regional accounting data are a precise and powerful tool of analysis - especially in determining the multiplier effects of exogenous expenditure in each region - which enriches our knowledge of regional economies and appreciation of the effect of regional policies.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis investigates economic aspects of the measurement of fiscal decentralisation to establish how a nation's fiscal arrangements can be consistently measured, so they can be compared internationally. A new index of fiscal decentralisation is developed that reflects two key elements of the theory of fiscal decentralisation: the fiscal autonomy of subnational governments; and their fiscal importance. The role of fiscal inequality in subnational governments' public finances is also considered. The thesis consists of nine chapters which are distinct but closely related. These nine chapters can be divided into the three

Project (M.P.P.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Master of Public Policy Program) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Philosophy, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 268 p.; also includes graphics (some col.). Includes abstract and vita. Adviser: Donald Haurin, Dept. of Economics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-268).

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