Tax interaction dynamics among Belgian municipalities 1984-1997 (original) (raw)

Politics and Flemish local tax rates: a simultaneous spatial panel data study (1992-2006)

An impressive amount of studies points to the impact of political and institutional characteristics on a community"s fiscal policy. Most of the time, these characteristics are studied in isolation : possible interactions with other political determinants are ignored. Yet, fiscal policy decisions are subject to political and institutional forces contemporaneously. In this paper, we join different models, while explaining simultaneously the variation in the Flemish local income tax rate and the local property tax rate using an extended dataset covering 3 local elections. When confronting the 1 Corresponding author: Stijn Goeminne, e-mail: stijn.goeminne@hogent.be, Tel: +32 9 248 88 34, Fax: +32 9 242 42 09. The authors are grateful to Benny Geys, Mona Grinwis, Bruno Heyndels, Marc Jegers, Leo Van Hove and Magali Verdonck for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper and to Jan Vermeir, Bruno Heyndels and Benny Geys for sharing their dataset. We also gratefully acknowle...

Tax Interaction Among Walloon Municipalities: Is there Room for Yardstick Competition, Intellectual Trend and Partisan Monopoly Effect?

European Economics: Political Economy & Public Economics eJournal, 2012

Three sources of strategic tax interactions among local jurisdictions are usually considered in the literature: public expenditure spill-over, tax competition and yardstick competition. However, another source has now been suggested: the intellectual trend. According to that hypothesis, politicians of the same party tend to behave similarly: incumbents of the same party mimic each other’s policies. Moreover partisan politics may also act through a monopoly power effect linked to several terms of power for the same party, consecutively: a political party is more likely to have implemented tax rates corresponding to its ideology if it has ruled the municipality several legislatures in a row. The paper proposes an empirical analysis of tax interactions among Walloon municipalities (the Southern part of Belgium) in view of discriminating among the sources of interaction. Yardstick hypothesis, intellectual trend hypothesis and potential partisan monopoly power effect are tested. Spatial ...

The Role of Tax Competition in Internal Territorial Tax Regimes: Federal States and the European Union

2018

This paper carries out a reflection, from a comparative perspective, on tax competition within the federal states, especially in the countries of America and Europe. For this, the authors explain the different aspects of the problem: fiscal competition; the decentralization and federalism and its fiscal effect; the fiscal federalism; and the tax competition in federal states. The authors seek to explain these phenomena and evaluate the positive and negative arguments that have been given about tax competition in this context. The authors describe how fiscal decentralization and fiscal competition are phenomena that have overpassed the Federal States and has been extended to countries with other forms of State.