LIBRI DI GIORGIO BROSIO

Equalization transfers, or grants, are a crucial component of modern federal and unitary countries. They also shape the evolution of different political systems promoting convergence in their effective working. The literature does not provide studies with a long-term and comparative perspective despite the relevance of this approach to the study of intergovernmental relations. The paper provides a contribution aimed at filling this void. It considers a small set of countries, including two unitary systems, Italy and the UK with a focus on English local government and three federal countries, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Federal systems are now paying more attention than initially to uniformity of policies and equality of access to the benefits of public policies, while unitary systems show much more attention than in the past to reaching equality of access and benefits from policies through local autonomy and use of transparent intergovernmental grants, rather than with hierarchical command. Another way of illustrating this process is stressing the growing recognition of common citizenship in both federal and unitary states.

The paper offers a review of the recent processes of structural reform of subnational government in France, Spain and Denmark. Shrinking the number of levels of government and of the number of units at each level was the main aim of those processes. The paper analyzes motivation and results, focusing on political and institutional constraints with a special emphasis on the impact of electoral systems. Spain and France show similarities with Italy concerning the structure of decentralized government and ambitions of reform. Denmark represents a very interesting case combining a pure proportional system of representation with a corporatist decision-making process. This combination requires a global and negotiated approach to intergovernmental reform, also. France and Spain seem to have operated within a shorter time frame that privileges immediate results. Contrary to Denmark established layers of government in both France and Spain, such as the municipalities and the provinces, seem to have been almost immune to reform.

Il Rapporto sulla finanza locale 2008 affronta una questione di grande portata: l’approvazione da parte del Governo di un Disegno di legge delega per l’attuazione dell’art. 119 della Costituzione, la norma che ha introdotto nell’ordinamento italiano il federalismo fiscale. Una svolta legislativa da tempo attesa per la definizione di un nuovo assetto dei rapporti finanziari tra Stato, Regioni ed Enti locali, nella prospettiva di un maggior decentramento.

In this paper we survey some cases of earmarked taxation. We focus, in particular, on road pricing (that can be interpreted as a tax on traffic flows), and on tourism tax. We show that, in both cases, a pigouvian tax (i.e. a tax used to correct external effects caused by traffic or tourists) can be interpreted as a earmarked tax by simply using its revenue to fund public infrastructures aimed at easing congestion caused by traffic or tourists. We also consider the difficulties of implementing such schemes by analysing a few actual experiences in other countries.