Local urban governments financing a comparison between countries

Abstract

This paper is intended to analyze, in a comparative pespective, the finacing mechanisms of urban local governments in two groups of countries. The frist group refers to a sample of OECD countries. They are rather decentralized, and have institutional features which date back many years from now. The scope of responsabilities faced by these contries urban governments, as well as the resources they run are quite substantial relative to developing countries. The second group is constituted by a number of Latin American countries. They are, in general, less decentralized and have the characteristic of not having a well stablished institutional structure. This has experienced various chages over the reacent years one of them being a process of transfering responsabilities to local tiers of governments, a tendency which in general, has not been accompained by an increasing capacity to get resources neither from the central government nor from the local financial market