3.2.2 phân cấp tài chínhIt is difficult to define and measure the degree of decentralization as the concept itself is broad, and also complex in terms of both quantitative and qualitative indicators (World Bank 2004). Indeed, decentralization covers fields such as politics, administration, and budget. Nevertheless, conventional measures of the degree of fiscal decentralization used in the literature relate subnational government revenue (or expenditure) to consolidated general government revenue (expenditure), as derived from IMF GFS. However, these common fiscal indicators tend to overestimate the degree of fiscal decentralization, especially in federal countries compared to unitary countries, as they do not provide any information on the shares over which subnational governments have significant control. Consequently, they misrepresent the actual level of fiscal decentralization in several countries (such as Austria and Germany) and introduce bias in the results of empirical studies (Stegarescu 2004). Following recent work on this topic, we use two indicators to represent the different aspects of decentralization. To test the hypothesis that fiscal autonomy leads to a smaller state, we first use a measure of revenue decentralization that is based on an analytical framework provided by the OECD (1999), which classifies taxes according to the degree of local discretion. We also include a measure of vertical imbalance, that is, the degree to which subnational governments rely on central government revenues to support their expenditure. Vertical imbalance is likely to increase the size of the public sector when the expenditure responsibilities of subnational governments do not match their revenue raising power.
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