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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6623 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Dewit, Andrew Pieter James |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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