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J. Bröthaler, G. Gutheil-Knopp-Kirchwald, P. Mayerhofer, S. Schönfelder:
"Long-term Fiscal Effects of Urban Development Projects";
Talk: EURA 2013 Conference, Cities as Seedbeds for Innovation, Enschede (The Netherlands); 2013-07-03 - 2013-07-06; in: "EURA 2013 Conference, Cities as Seedbeds for Innovation", EURA 2013 website (www.eura2013.org), (2013), Paper ID 185, 21 pages.

Many European cities are challenged with severe fiscal pressure on the municipal budget at the same time as new demands are arising from demographic ageing and migration gains. This is leading to the need for innovative approaches combining urban planning and budgetary planning. An instrument that enables the evaluation of long-term fiscal effects of urban development projects at an early planning stage is fiscal impact analysis.
Based on recent literature, the paper raises several methodical issues concerning fiscal impact analyses in a metropolitan planning context, and presents new insights from model-driven case studies for Vienna, Austria. It is shown that the definition of system boundaries (spatial, functional and institutional boundaries, considering overlapping effects and the complex budgetary structure in larger municipalities) is one of the major challenges and yet a precondition to ensure the comparability of different project results.
Trying to overcome a shortage of many fiscal impact analyses, we propose a hierarchical approach to measure the fiscal profitability of urban development projects:
a) Functional view: expenditure and direct revenue for project-specific public infrastructure only,
b) Classical view of fiscal impact analyses which additionally includes tax revenues induced by new residents and employees (including effects from tax sharing system), and
c) Extended view taking into account also the indirectly project-induced expenditures depending on the number and demographic structure of new inhabitants (e.g. for health care).
Our results show that a negative balance in a functional perspective (a) easily can be compensated by local tax revenues if the preconditions, partly influenced by urban planning, enable a sufficient tax base. However, the resulting positive fiscal impacts (b) turn out to be overestimated as soon as indirect demographic effects are considered (c).
The paper concludes with suggestions for the integration of fiscal evaluation tools into a "learning" planning process.

Ökonomische Aspekte spielen in der Stadtentwicklungsplanung eine zunehmend wichtige Rolle. In dem Beitrag werden die methodischen Herausforderungen bei der Anwendung der fiskalischen Wirkungsanalyse zur Abschätzung der längerfristigen fiskalischen Effekte von Stadtentwicklungsprojekten behandelt.

urban development projects, fiscal impact analysis, municipal budget planning