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J. Bröthaler, M. Getzner:
"Evaluating Reforms of Federalism and the Spending and Revenue Sharing System";
Talk: AESOP Annual Congress '17 - Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity: Fostering the European Dimension of Planning, Lissabon; 07-11-2017 - 07-14-2017.

Many countries in Europe face numerous challenges with respect to reforming their system of fiscal relations between different levels of government. For planning, the system of fiscal relations is paramount for estimating costs, benefits, efficiency and distributional effects of spatial development including infrastructure and regional programs.
In Austria, larger reforms have not taken place, though, have been discussed and asked for during the last decades. Instead of substantial reforms, incremental changes have moved towards some simplifications of fiscal relations while at the same time leaving the manifold untransparent transfer systems unaltered. Recently, new steps have been undertaken to reform the law on the spending and revenue sharing system.
Evaluating the changes brought about by the reforms of fiscal relations is not straight-forward. The spending and revenue sharing system fulfills many different tasks, and rests on numerous political aims and objectives. For instance, one aim is to distribute tax revenues according to the territorial sources of revenues in order that e.g. local government may fulfill their public tasks. While this aim is certainly built upon a certain understanding of efficiency, equity and justice between jurisdictions (e.g. spatial disparities) should also be taken into account. Therefore, the aim of efficiency is overlapping with distributional objectives. This may finally result in a completely untransparent system in which policy makers are not anymore able to make informed decisions in terms of achieving their goals.
The presentation shows a framework for evaluating the direction in which fiscal federalism reforms develop the whole system; while we cannot judge whether a certain spending and revenue sharing system is per se efficient, we present a concept of different efficiency and distribution criteria with which we can evaluate whether a certain reform might rather lead to a transparent and more effective direction. By the Austrian example, we can show that the current reform takes two steps in the `right´ direction while at the same time consuming some efficiency gains by taking one step back by introducing even more complex regulations.

Der Vortrag behandelt die Bewertung des Finanzausgleichssystem im Kontext der Stadt- und Regionalplanung. Ausgehend von allgemeinen Zusammenhängen zwischen Raumplanung und öffentlichen Finanzen wird die empirische Entwicklung des Finanzausgleichs und die Bedeutung für die Gemeinden in Österreich dargestellt. Im Zentrum steht ein mehrdimensionaler Bewertungsrahmen für die Beurteilung von Reformen des Finanzausgleichs speziell im Hinblick auf räumliche Planung und Entwicklung.

Revenue Sharing System, Federalism, Spatial Planning, Land Use development