Local governments in Japan account for about 80 per cent of general government spending when excluding social security expenditures. Therefore, for the implementation of fiscal policy it is important how local governments will behave. On the basis of the economic theories on fiscal federalism it is generally rational for local government entities, especially smaller ones, not to participate in the stabilisation policy of the central government and to take a free rider position. Such a behaviour would imply a substantial reduction or even an offsetting of the effects of a stabilisation policy of the central government. As for empirical evidence, a procyclical behaviour of local entities was observed in several countries, among them Germany. We show that in Japan this was not the case and that so far local governments do participate in the stabilisation efforts of the central government. In a second step we show the institutional arrangements that have enabled the central government to influence the fiscal beh baviour of the local governments accordingly. Will recent regulatory changes and the enourmous debt level have a significant impact? We argue that although from April 2000 some legal changes in the direction of decentralisation were enforced, many influence mechanisms remained intact and thus the changes weaken the established system, but did not break it up altogether.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DUETT/oai:DUETT:duett-07222002-140752 |
| Date | 22 July 2002 |
| Creators | Pascha, Werner , Robaschik, Frank |
| Contributors | none |
| Publisher | Gerhard-Mercator-Universitaet Duisburg |
| Source Sets | Dissertations and other Documents of the Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://www.ub.uni-duisburg.de/ETD-db/theses/available/duett-07222002-140752/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. Hiermit erteile ich der Universitaet Duisburg das nicht-ausschliessliche Recht unter den unten angegebenen Bedingungen, meine Dissertation, Staatsexamens- oder Diplomarbeit, meinen Forschungs- oder Projektbericht zu veroeffentlichen und zu archivieren. Ich behalte das Urheberrecht und das Recht das Dokument zu veroeffentlichen und in anderen Arbeiten weiterzuverwenden. |
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