Fernando Rubiera Morollón, Laura Varela Candamio (p), Gohar Sedrakyan (p)

Urban sprawl is a common phenomenon in cities that have grown following the generalized use of private vehicles as the main means of transport. For that reason it has not been a frequent phenomenon in Europe, where most of the cities had their main develops before the generalization of the automobile. Nevertheless, during the last two decades many cities on the old continent have begun to sprawl. For the case of Spain Rubiera et al. (2016) shows, using an international comparable measure, how the level of sprawl of the Spanish cities increased significantly in last years reaching levels that, in many cases, are comparable with the most dispersed cities of U.S.
Under this context it is interesting to explore the impact of this tendency to increase the urban sprawl of the Spanish cities. For instance, Rubiera et al. (2016) study the land depredation caused by the dispersion of the metropolitan area of Madrid. Lasarte et al. (2017) analyze the effect of sprawl on the energy consumption. In line with these previous papers the particular objective of this work is to explore which are the consequences of sprawl of the Spanish urban areas over the fiscal sustainability or fiscal burden.
The tax resources, applicable to the Spanish municipalities of common regime, include a set of three taxes that the municipalities demand in all cases and another two taxes that the municipalities have the power to establish or not. The taxes of compulsory levy are: property tax, local business tax and local motor vehicle tax. The taxes susceptible of discretional establishment are: the increase in value of the urban nature land tax and the constructions, facilities and works tax. The municipalities also have the capacity to modify tax rates, percentages and coefficients with certain limitations, all of them makes it possible for each municipality to act on the tax burden’ citizens. Thus, we then transform these resources into per capita tax revenues at constant prices as the dependent variable, which can be considered as a proxy of fiscal burden (Benito et al., 2010).
Using data from Spanish local corporations of the main urban areas of Spain from the Spanish Ministry of Finance and Public Office for the period 2000-2016 and the Urban Sprawl Index (USI) we finally analyze the relationship between urban sprawl level and fiscal burden.

Claudia Ferretti, Chiara Bocci (p), Patrizia Lattarulo

The study of policies exercised on property tax is of great interest especially at a time of significant regulatory change, in term of centralization/decentralization, such as at the present. Then, property tax is the most popular tax in European countries but also the most controversial entry for financing local government.
In this paper we firstly estimate, through the use of a spatial model, the determinants of the different fiscal policies adopted by 6424 Italian municipalities. To this end, we considered both variables that measure the budget features of the municipalities and variables that are specifically related to their economic and social context. As a first result, the model shows how the choices on policies are determined by socio-economic features and even by neighboring municipalities behavior. In fact, the policy choices have a well-defined spatial distribution, with homogeneous territorial areas in which neighboring governments tend to adopt similar behavior between them.
The existence of strategic interactions between municipalities is, in literature, explained by some theoretical models, such as the "yardstick competition" and the spillover effects. In its second part, the paper focuses the analysis on these two aspects, in order to find empirical confirmation(or lack of it) to such hypotheses. Regarding the first, the model does not highlight any effect of the yardstick competition, despite some variables on the political context are significant in determining the fiscal policy. This result allows us to assume that the imitative behavior among municipalities on their tax policies are determined mainly from spillover effects. To confirm this hypothesis, the model identifies a negative relationship between the spatial interactions and population size. The intuition is that a most populated municipality is less sensitive to the changes in tax policies by a small neighboring municipality, because there are negligible spillover effects on its residents. These evidences may lead to interesting implications regarding the institutional rescaling of medium-sized municipalities, with the aim of better administrative performances.

Attila Varga (p), Norbert Szabó (p), Tamás Sebestyén

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Anna Mikhaylova (p), Vladimir Klimanov

The main indicators of socio-economic development of regions have been systematized to identify interrelationships between financial incentives from the federal government and growth rates of the regional economy in Russia.
The hypothesis of conditional and unconditional β-convergence for the Russia’s regions has been tested. Firstly, steam regression dependence of the logarithm values of the growth rate of gross regional product (GRP) per capita in 2014 relative to 2006 from the logarithm of the initial level of GRP per capita in 2006 has been evaluated. The results show that in the period under review, the hypothesis of β-convergence presence in relation to Russia’s regions does not reject. The coefficient of the independent variable is negative and statistically significant at the 1% level. This shows that the regions, in which the level of GDP per capita, were lower at the first period, grew faster at the whole interval.
The rate of convergence with regard to Russia’s regions in the considered period is 1.6%, which is very close in meaning to the results obtained by international researchers regarding the convergence between the countries of the world.
Regression models have been evaluated to test the effect of intergovernmental transfers from the federal budget in the convergence process. We tested conditional convergence hypothesis, with the inclusion of additional control variables, which in fact is equivalent to testing the hypothesis of conditional β-convergence, where these measures economic policy accepted as convergence conditions. Thus, the following control variables were: the average ratio (for the period 2006-14) of gratuitous receipts in the budget of the region from other budgets of the budget system to the GRP, the average ratio of gratuitous receipts in regional budgets from the federal one to total revenues of regional budgets. The hypothesis of conditional convergence suggests that regression sign at the initial level of GRP per capita should be negative, and the sign at control variable should be positive. We confirmed the hypothesis about the importance of such government policies as intergovernmental transfers. The coefficients in front of the two control variables are positive and significant at the 5% level. There is a positive connection between the volume of intergovernmental transfers and the rate of growth of the regional GDP per capita.