Categories of Local Economic Development: An Empirical Analysis

In examining local economic development incentives, scholars have found it useful to employ typologies of development practices. Such typologies have been based on assumptions that techniques reflect functional categories, such as marketing and financial incentives, or can be organized by the nature of costs and benefits, or by the nature of incentive goals. While useful heuristic devices, little effort has been made to test these typologies empirically. This research note provides an empirically based typology of local economic development incentives, using data from 967 cities collected by the International City Management Association.     

邮轮旅游供应链的旅行社激励机制研究:组织游客奖励还是营销推广扶持?

考虑到旅行社在我国邮轮旅游销售供应链中的重要性,邮轮港口所在地政府为推进邮轮旅游产业发展,普遍对旅行社实施两种激励政策——组织游客奖励与营销推广扶持。但两类激励政策对当地政府、邮轮公司及旅行社的效益影响尚不明确。本文首先建立“政府-邮轮公司-旅行社”三阶段主从博弈模型,以研究两种激励政策对两企业运营决策的作用机理,并给出政府在最大化市场需求目标下的最优激励政策。其次,借助数值仿真实验分析了不同情形下基于最优激励政策时市场需求和企业利润的变化。结果表明:站在政府角度,激励政策有两种选择——仅采取营销推广激励或者两种激励方式并存,而且最优激励设计受到补贴预算、旅行社营销推广能力及其岸上游收益的影响。站在旅行社角度,作为激励政策的直接受益方,其定价与营销努力决策会受到两类激励方式的不同影响;而对于营销推广能力较强的旅行社,可以依赖于政府奖励适当提高船票价格,以改善当前国内邮轮市场的低价竞争。站在邮轮公司角度,即使自身没有直接得到激励资金,其仍能间接获得激励政策所带来的红利。研究结论可为政府的邮轮旅游激励政策的设计提供理论参考,并为邮轮公司与旅行社在面对政府财政干预时提供决策建议。     

Regulating Local Tax Abatement Policies

This article addresses several questions about property tax. abatements in the United States, all directed at why tax abatements should be regulated more closely, and one question about how this might be accomplished. First, are tax abatements “job increment financing” since they are exchanged for future jobs? Public decisionmakers assume that jobs mean tax revenues, but problems emerge when abatements are granted without knowledge of expected jobs, or if local government administrators and planners have no means of holding businesses accountable if their promises are not kept. Second, are local decisionmakers behaving imprudently when they abate multiyear taxes? Using abatements may not always be a particularly prudent way of using public resources. Third, can tax abatements undermine local democracy? Abatements weaken public involvement in city government when citizens have few opportunities to debate decisionmakers about tax exemptions, but they should have such a chance because abatements have costly, longlasting effects on current and future citizens. Fourth, do abatements create social costs? Tax abatements generate external effects for those who are not party to the politics of tax exemptions, but there are no easy answers about how to correct the externalities. Finally, what are the options for stopping tax abatements? These include federal prohibition, cooperative agreements, federal fiscal incentives, the courts, tougher negotiating tactics, and more stringent contractual provisions by urban planners and administrators.     

民国时期地方税收权力的流失——以1939—1949年重庆营业税为中心的考察

抗战全面爆发以后,重庆由四川省辖市升级为院辖市,逐步建立起独立的地方财政税收制度。作为地方税收的大宗,营业税本是重庆市政府增加财政收入的重要途径,但是,重庆市营业税权力却遭到四川省政府、中央政府、重庆市商人团体和参议会的分割、侵蚀而流失。以营业税为主的地方税收权力大量流失,直接导致地方财政困乏,也是影响国家政权稳定的重要因素之一。     

FEDERAL TAX POLICY DEVELOPMENTS AFFECTING THE CONSERVATION OF CRITICAL LANDS: GROWING RESTRAINTS ON LOCAL INITIATIVES

This commentary touches upon certain aspects of federal tax policy that impact on land conservation in the United States. The focus is on the development and use of tax incentives to encourage private or non-governmental efforts to protect unique wildlife specie habitat, farmlands, historic areas, scenic landscapes, and recreational resources. In recent years tax incentives favored private conservation initiatives; recent legislative and administrative developments introduced a high degree of federal supervision.     

The Politics of Superannuation in Australasia: Saving the New Zealand Standard of Living

Support for retired individuals is one of the key policy issues facing governments throughout the OECD. The need for a long-term approach to the issue of retirement saving is well established. New Zealand and Australia have adopted different approaches to retirement saving. Two primary differences exist in retirement saving policy – New Zealand offers little in the way of incentives and there is no compulsion; conversely, Australia provides highly concessionary tax incentives and a mandatory occupational retirement savings scheme exists. This paper offers suggestions on how and why two countries that typically approach policy issues from a similar direction have adopted such different attitudes to the topic of retirement saving.     

Development of Local Financial Systems in Mainland China

Two Beijing-based economic geographers present a comprehensive study of local financial systems in China. The paper analyzes the most recently available (2006) regional data on exogenous (state-owned, foreign-owned, and joint shareholder-owned) and endogenous (city commercial banks and rural credit cooperatives) banks, highlighting the differences between the country's coastal and the lagging rural provinces located in China's central and western macroregions. A key component of the analysis is the geographic distribution of bank branches and assets. Special attention is devoted to Shanghai, the country's traditional financial center, which has attracted the bulk of foreign-owned banks and financial service providers seeking entry into the vast Chinese market. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: G21, G28, O18, P34. 9 figures, 3 tables, 54 references.     

THE PUBLIC LIFE OF ECONOMIC INCENTIVES

Many current proposals for policy reform call for the use of economic incentives. The growing application of economic incentives in a number of policy areas necessitates continuing critical examination of the claims for and the criticisms of their use. Early empirical evidence on the implementation of incentive schemes serves to shed light on the validity of some of the supporting and opposing arguments. By continuing the assessment of the viability of economic incentives, this study reveals that incentive alternatives face obstacles to use stemming from implementation problems, but political and philosophical issues pose greater threats. Nevertheless, the use of incentives can best be defended on political and moral grounds. Political resistance can be overcome and incentives can be employed effectively, if incentive schemes are understood as fostering one form of social interaction in a mixed regime.     

清代回疆粮赋制度研究:牛津大学所藏清代库车、沙雅尔署衙档案之探讨

本文利用牛津大学所藏清代回疆档案文献资料和清代其他文献相互印证,对库车和沙雅尔两地的赋税征收制度中若干问题进行了探讨。清代回疆粮赋征收制度具有如下特点:主要土地占有形式"原垦地亩"和"官地"二者田赋的征收是"视岁收数目"而非土地面积,显示出与中原地区自古以来的赋税征收制度的差异。制度规定以籽种的十倍作为实际产量来征收田赋,在此基础上总体上确定某地田赋总额。回疆各城粮赋征收额是一个变化的数据,变化的原因是多方面的。粮赋实际征收中出现明显的负担不均衡的现象。     

The Politics of an Emergent Global Regime for Controlling Tax Competition

This article probes what I call the emergent global regime for controlling tax competition. Since at least the early 1990s, states have perceived that competition for investment, whether through direct subsidies or tax incentives, threatens to undermine the fiscal underpinnings of the modern state, particularly in terms of its provision of social welfare programs. As states have provided financial or fiscal subsidies to capital (especially mobile capital), they have had to compensate through some combination of imposing higher levels of taxation on other actors, running higher deficits, and cutting spending. Each has shown itself to have substantial problems, and the response of states has now come full circle: to reconsider the competition for investment that causes the fiscal problems in the first place.     

DO LOCATION‐BASED TAX INCENTIVES IMPROVE QUALITY OF LIFE AND QUALITY OF BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT?

We examine how location‐based tax incentives affect quality of life and business environment through changes in property values and equilibrium wages. Using the federal Empowerment Zone program, we determine whether offering tax incentives to firms improves the welfare of the citizens and attractiveness to firms. We demonstrate that quality of life methodologies can be applied using small geographically aggregated data, such as census block groups. We find that the tax incentives offered by the program notably enhances the quality of business environment for firms in the area while modestly improving the quality of life for the individuals living in the area.     

Financing Decentralized Development in a Low‐Income Country: Raising Revenue for Local Government in Uganda

Uganda has been engaged for a number of years in an ambitious programme of political and financial decentralization involving significantly expanded expenditure and service delivery responsibilities for local governments in what are now forty‐five districts. Fiscal decentralization has involved allocation of block grants from the centre to complement increased local tax revenue‐raising efforts by districts and municipalities. This article is concerned with the financial side of decentralization and in particular with an examination of district government efforts to raise revenue with the tax instruments which have been assigned to them. These are found to be deficient in a number of ways and their tax raising potential not to be commensurate with the responsibilities being devolved. Achievement of the decentralization aims laid down, therefore, must depend either on the identification of new or modified methods of raising revenue locally, or increased commitment to transfer of financial resources from the centre, or both.     

THE IMPACT OF MARGINAL BUSINESS TAXES ON STATE MANUFACTURING

We estimate the impact of manufacturer business taxes on value added during the 1990s for 15 manufacturing sectors in 20 U.S. states. When the tax climate is properly measured as the potential liability arising from new investment in a state, we estimate that a 10 percent reduction in the effective tax liability is associated with a 3.5 to 5.3 percent increase in value added for the state's targeted manufacturing industry. When we isolate the value of industrial incentives from the basic tax system in our theoretically preferred marginal tax measure, we find that a 10 percent reduction in liability achieved by way of lowering taxes is associated with a 4.5 percent increase in value added while an equivalent reduction achieved by way of increasing incentives is associated with only 1.2 percent industrial growth, the latter elasticity not statistically different from zero.     

Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic instrument for more ‘rational’, effective and efficient environmental policy or by their critics as an exogenously imposed conduit of hegemonic neoliberalism. This introductory article to the special issue that follows advocates for and demonstrates a more grounded and historically situated approach for understanding the conformation and outcomes of PES in actual practice. It proposes a framework for examining individual PES initiatives as shaped by dynamic interactions between imposed structure and the development pathways and situated agency of actors in the territories in which they are implemented. It finds that certain ubiquitous components of this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — provide potential openings for articulation and engagement that can allow these initiatives to be contested, adapted, hybridized or more fully co-opted and captured. This framework opens a pathway for more inclusive, nuanced and grounded research on PES and on market-based environment and development policies more broadly.     

The politics of finance in Napoleonic Italy (1802‐1814)

Abstract

The Republic and Kingdom of Italy (1802‐14) served as an important source of revenues for Napoleonic France. Most importantly, the authorities had to pay for a growing Italian army and for the French troops in northern Italy. To satisfy the Emperor's increasing financial pressure, Prina, the Finance Minister, increased the tax burden and reorganized the financial administration and tax collection. Prina kept a moderate property tax to secure the support of the landowners and raised indirect taxes, thereby increasing the burden on the poor. His reforms in the financial administration made it more orderly, uniform and efficient, thus strengthening the central state. While Prina modernized the financial machinery and expanded the state's resources, the fiscal pressure contributed to growing hostility from the population to the Napoleonic state. Following the fall of the Kingdom of Italy, the Austrians left the Napoleonic financial system intact, a demonstration of Prina's effective reforms and long‐term impact.     

The Impact of Proportional Representation on Turnout: Evidence from New Zealand

Theories of voter turnout assume that institutional arrangements can alter incentives for participation. Countries with proportional representation (PR) are assumed to increase the incentives to participate because they reduce the proportion of votes that are wasted, giving voters a stronger incentive to participate and parties a stronger incentive to mobilise voters. This paper departs from previous cross-national studies by employing individual-level data during a transition between electoral systems in one country. We used survey data collected before and after electoral reform in New Zealand to examine patterns of participation among political minorities. As a direct test of individual change, the analysis was supplemented with survey data from the last election held under first past the post (FPP) merged with validated participation data from the following election held under PR. We found that the adoption of PR in New Zealand has succeeded initially in fostering more positive attitudes about the efficacy of voting. In New Zealand's first election held under PR, voters who were on the extreme left were significantly more likely to participate than previously, leading to an overall increase in turnout.     

Spatial Analysis of Residential Prices in Istanbul

The purpose of this paper is to examine the spatial distribution of housing prices at the metropolitan and at the district level of Istanbul. At the metropolitan level, the most important factors which affect housing prices are sub-market, floor area and sea view. At the district level, housing prices vary from district to district according to locational, socio-economic and property characteristics. High-income sub-markets have higher coefficient of determinations and more significant variables than low-income sub-markets. Furthermore, the results suggest that planned districts have higher housing prices; thus, restructuring squatter areas and revitalizing inner city areas provide not only benefits to individuals but also higher tax revenues to the city.     

A Study of Suzhou as the Economic Center of China during the Ming and Qing Dynasties

As the biggest tax payer in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties, Suzhou was the most prominent center to provide tax, money and grain for the country. It was known for its commodity production of silk, cotton, and printed materials. Suzhou’s wood manufacturing and processing industry were also unrivaled. Meanwhile, Suzhou was famous for jade carvings, embroidery, mounting, lacquer, musical instruments and other processing industries of copper, iron, gold, silver, etc. As a world-famous center of commodity production and processing, Suzhou exported the local commodities and imported various kinds of raw materials. Suzhou was also a transportation center in China, transporting goods and materials across the country and balancing the market. Financial institutions such as banks and exchange shops were established in Suzhou as well, where the circulation of silver and copper coins was voluminous and the use of foreign silver coins started early. With advanced financial settlement methods, Suzhou absorbed the capital from towns and cities nearby, profited from high cash turnover, and became a highly developed financial center. As far as the economic aggregate, commodity production and circulation were concerned, Suzhou was a far more advanced urban center than Hangzhou which was another industrial and financial city.     

明清苏州经济中心地位略论

明清时代的苏州,交纳赋税最多,负担最重,是全国最为突出的赋税钱粮重地;丝绸、棉布及加工业和书籍刻印等大宗商品生产极为发达,木器制造加工业独步全国,玉器雕琢、绣作、裱褙作、漆作、乐器、铜铁金银器加工业等极其精巧,是举世闻名的商品生产加工中心;大规模输出当地大宗商品,输入各种原材料,转输全国物资并平衡整合市场,是全国物资的流通转输中心;钱庄、票号等金融机构布设密集,银钱流通量巨大,较早行用洋银,金融结算手段较为先进,吸纳周围城镇的资本,货币周转获利较快,是高度发达的银钱金融中心。从当时苏州的经济总量、商品生产和商品流通来看,其中心都市的地位远在另一工商城市杭州之上。     

Transformation,job creation and subsidies to creative industries: the case of South Africa’s film and television sector

Many governments have tried to stimulate economic growth via policy in the creative industries. South Africa is no different but additionally has an overarching aim of achieving social and labour market ‘transformation’ to move away from the legacy of the apartheid era. The effectiveness of incentives provided to the film and television sector in South Africa are considered in terms of their stated objectives of job creation, skills and knowledge transfer, and the attraction of foreign direct investment. Informed by empirical analysis of incentive scheme data and supplemented by elite interviews with key informants, some specific policy revisions are proposed.