Taxes, transfers and transition – adjusting local finances to new structures and institutions

This article compares and contrasts how three countries, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, created democratic local government, and especially how they organised its finances, from 1990 on. Hungary, in contrast to what was then Czechoslovakia, experimented with decentralisation before 1989, and was able to draw on its experiences later when faced with creating an intermediate level of elected local government capable of taking over services such as education or health. In the other countries it took longer to agree the boundaries and powers of such an intermediate level. The contrasts are explored with regard to functions and structures, sources of revenue, and the financing of capital programmes. The three countries appear to have reached plateaux in which elected local government has an important place, and reasonably stable sources of financing, though the more ambitious aims of the years immediately after 1989 are unlikely to be achieved

Business · Capital (architecture · Central government · Czech · Decentralization · Democracy · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Government (linguistics · Local government · Market economy · Political science · Politics · Revenue · Economic and Fiscal Studies · Local Government Finance and Decentralization · Public Administration · Regional Development and Policy · Finance

• Metaphors of Governance in Central and Eastern Europe

  Roger Lawrence•Local Government Studies•2010

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