We create a 50 state Tax and Expenditure Limits (TEL) severity index by government type. Counties and municipalities differ in their revenue structure and economic functions.TELs constrict counties...

Can environmental regulation promote green innovation and the productivity of cities? The “Compliance Cost” (CC) perspective and the “Porter Hypothesis” (PH) offer contrasting views, whereas the existing empirical results are inconclusive. This paper aims to highlight the roles of multifaceted government interventions, including government-to-firm subsidies, tax levies on firms, and environmental infrastructure provisions, in moderating environmental regulation for realizing PH. Based on the fixed-effects models for Chinese prefecture cities from 2005–2013, we found that environmental regulation positively impacted green innovation but negatively affected productivity. The results of moderating effects suggest that environmental regulation can better promote green innovation if it is compounded with more government-to-firm subsidies, lower firm tax burdens, and increased environmental infrastructure provisions. We further decomposed the impacts of these interventions across seven fields of green innovation and found that subsidy and tax burden relief were especially effective in facilitating more GI in the sector of transportation and alternative energy production. This paper amplifies the theoretical framework of PH by accentuating the analytical lens of multifaceted government interventions but also provides insights into how local governments can effectively design “carrot-and-stick” policies to realize PH at the city level.

Since the onset of the Great Recession, austerity has become more common at the national and local levels throughout the OECD. As states pass expenditure responsibilities down to the local level, this causes a shift toward mandatory spending at the local level which may undermine discretionary spending for social and physical infrastructure. We use Census of Government Finance data from 2012 for all county areas in the continental US to model the expenditure gap between current operations and capital investment, and show how this crowd out affects growth. Our structural equation models find fiscal decentralization has direct negative effects on local growth and indirect negative effects on growth by increasing the local current-capital expenditure gap. This local expenditure gap is larger where decentralization of spending responsibility is higher and state aid is lower, especially in places with greater need (poverty, older infrastructure, and rural areas). In contrast to the theoretical claims of fiscal efficiency, we find fiscal decentralization may be undermining local economic growth by increasing the gap between local current and capital expenditure. We argue that fiscal federalism (decentralization) is “broken” in the US because states have structural incentives to shift fiscal responsibility downward to local government, and local governments face increased social and economic need, especially since the Great Recession.

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) represents a politics of repair for American Federalism. The unprecedented size, scope, and timeliness of ARPA enable local governments to address some of the structural inequities laid bare by the pandemic. U.S. Federalism was broken before the pandemic, with states exerting a triangle of pressures that created a tightening vice on local government through revenue restrictions, downloading expenditure responsibilities, and restricting local policy authority. Recent federal action through ARPA has helped ease the pressure on local revenue, enabling new expenditures and new policy action. ARPA is larger, longer, and more expansive than the American Rescue and Recovery Act passed after the Great Recession. We analyze revenue and expenditure data for all local governments and special districts from 2000 through 2022. ARPA represents a layer in the palimpsest of federalist policy, a politics of repair, that reminds us that more cooperative federal-local relations are possible.

Regional cooperation has been increasingly recognized as indispensable in promoting coordinated regional development in China’s new urbanization. The “city-helps-city” cooperation arises as an important type of regional approach to reduce regional inequalities. This study focuses on the “city-helps-city” cooperation of the Mountain-Sea Cooperation Project in Zhejiang province and aims to examine how this type of cooperation affects the interjurisdictional linkages of backward places. First, based on the cellphone signaling data from China Mobile and social network analysis, we capture the interjurisdictional linkages represented by the population flow between poverty counties and other municipalities as our dependent variables, which are expected to be stimulated by the regional cooperation of Mountain-Sea projects. Second, through text semantic analysis on the news data of Mountain-Sea cooperation, we further identify three measures of cooperation, including the diversity of cooperation fields, the intensity of different cooperation focuses, and the legitimacy of cooperation as our main explanatory variables. Last, we run regression models to show differentiated impacts of cooperation diversity, intensity, and legitimacy on the linkages between poverty counties and developed places. The findings interrogate whether and how Mountain-Sea cooperation effectively engages backward localities in the regional network of economic production, social affairs, and institutional arrangements to enhance their linkages with other places. This study not only contributes to theoretical and empirical understandings of the state-driven “city-helps-city” cooperation as the new regional institution in transitional China, but also attempts to provide policy implications on reducing regional inequalities from the perspective of intercity cooperation.