Hyunjung Ji

The role of intergovernmental aid in defining fiscal sustainability at the sub-national level

The concept of fiscal sustainability has become increasingly used over the last 20 years. However, much of the literature on fiscal sustainability at the sub-national level ignores the role of intergovernmental fiscal relations. To address this gap, this paper discusses a sufficient condition for sub-national fiscal sustainability and examines the importance of intergovernmental aid in determining that sustainability. Using panel data of counties and municipalities in the US, and using unit root and cointegration analytic techniques, this paper finds different levels of fiscal sustainability between counties and municipalities. We also find that intergovernmental aid plays an important role for fiscal sustainability for both counties and municipalities.

All are not created equal: assessing local governments’ strategic approaches towards sustainability

ABSTRACT While local governments often implement equivalent numbers of sustainability programmes, they likely utilize different strategies to design them. We posit that some local governments pursue more of an exploration strategy, by experimenting with a broad range of sustainability issues and policy instruments to address them, while others pursue a more exploitation strategy, by focusing on a limited range of sustainability issues and policy instruments. We assess these distinctions across 70 local governments and offer evidence that governments indeed vary in their sustainability strategies. Such variations have important implications for local governments’ ability to improve their sustainability conditions over time.