In the last three decades, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has managed to replace its welfare-based urban housing system with a market-based housing provision scheme. With such significant housing policy changes, the PRC has successfully expanded urban home ownership and impressively increased per capita housing consumption. The housing market has become one of the major pillar industries ...

This paper develops the fiscal health index of 21 local governments in Taiwan over the 1984 to 2010 period. A quantile regression analysis was used to explore the extent that economic variables, political budget cycles, and legislative checks and balances, impact different quantiles of fiscal health index for a country over a sample period of time. Our findings suggest that local governments at...

This paper examines disparities between unitary central governments and local governments in how environmental policy is defined and implemented at the local level. This is done within the context of northeast Asia, where results can often differ from expectations driven by traditional models of local government behaviour offered by the West. A theoretical measure for policy distance between th...

Many governments today have made significant investment on Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) implementation. The employment of CiRM systems has increased the operational day-to-day and strategic long-term effectiveness of governments, particularly in relation to the intimacy of their relationship with the public. However, many of the initiatives have failed to deliver the benefits expected...

Accountability is a concept that has been difficult to clearly identify or measure. There is disagreement over definitions of accountability and a lack of empirical evidence about ways the concept might be dimensionalized, although there is agreement that it is multi-dimensional in nature. The aim of this study is to provide evidence of the existence of common types of accountability that are c...

We use US county level data from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. Increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively related to economic growth. We find no evidence that government is more efficient at lower levels. While we cannot separate out the productive and red...

Moody's ratings for tax-backed municipal bonds are derived from five primary credit factors: legal security, local economy , financial operations, debt profile and management. This special comment will focus on the debt component of Moody's analysis and ratings. Debt as a credit factor can not be isolated from the other credit factors, nor viewed as a stand-alone ratio or set of ratios. Rather,...

This paper explores the building of administrative and democratic institutions of local government in newly emerging democracies in parts of the former Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe. It covers the period through 2005. It studies the main objectives and achievements of the various reforms aimed at local government systems in Russia, Poland and Romania. The overall findi...

Background: After revenue-sharing system reform, the proportion of tax refund in fiscal transfer payments continued to decline, and the proportion of categorical grant and condition grant is increased. The paper studies how transfer payment structure effect fiscal efficiency from the perspective of local financial revenue structure. Methods: This paper use the SE-DEA model to measures the finan...