The Structure and Dynamics of the Budget of the City of Chelyabinsk in the 1950s–1980s

In the history of Soviet urban finance of the second half of the 20th century, the example of Chelyabinsk shows two periods of the most intensive growth of budget revenues in large industrial cities. These are the second half of the 1950s, when the city budget of Chelyabinsk grew by 136 % over five years, and the period of perestroika — 123 % over the same five years. In other time, the growth was much less rapid and sometimes even gave way to temporary declines. The structure of urban income has undergone a significant evolution from mainly local sources of income in the early 1950s to almost complete dependence on deductions from higher budgets by the end of the 1980s. The system of local taxes and fees has been constantly stagnating during the period under review, since the possibility of replenishing the city budget with deductions from all-Union taxes made the city authorities not interested in its intensification. This, in turn, led to the fact that the city budget was mainly used to finance public expenditures, such as the maintenance of health and education systems. That is why the city authorities were significantly limited in terms of spending budget funds for the actual city needs. And these needs in the form of a catastrophically increasing cost of maintaining the city’s housing and communal services steadily grew and became the largest item of expenditure in the city budget. This approach to budget policy and local finance made Soviet urban settlements subsidized, and even if real budget deficits were not often reached, dependence on external sources of income became one of the most important factors that hindered urban development

Business · Economic policy · Economics · Federal budget · Fiscal year · Geography · Human settlement · Macroeconomics · Market economy · Public finance · Revenue · Subsidy · Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends · Finance