scholarly journals Impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on the use of local government funds

2021 ◽  
Vol 129 ◽  
pp. 01028
Author(s):  
Viktor Soltes ◽  
Jana Stofkova ◽  
Jakub Durica
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Mathematical Statistics ◽  
Government Finance ◽  
Program Structure ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Local Government Finance ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact

Research background: Municipalities, as entities of local government, finance the performed activities on the basis of the budget, which has a program structure. However, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, municipal incomes have declined. Municipalities therefore had to adjust their budgets and reduce expenditures, which could disrupt several processes in municipalities. Purpose of the article: The main aim of the paper is to analyse the budgets of selected local government entities and assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of funds by municipalities with an emphasis on the security area. Methods: In order to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of funds by municipalities, a detailed analysis of the budgets and final accounts of selected municipalities will be carried out. The amount of income and expenditure in these municipalities before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic will be examined. For this purpose, basic scientific methods and methods of mathematical statistics will be used. Findings & Value added: Based on the assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic impact on the budgets of municipalities, it will be possible to determine the activities that experienced the largest revenue shortfalls due to the fact that the municipalities could not finance them from their revenues. The contribution of the paper will be recommendations that should prevent such situations in the future and thus prevent the amount of damage that has been recorded as a result of the loss of income of municipalities.

scholarly journals Does system of local government subsidisation fulfil revenue equalisation function? Evidence from Poland

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicja Sekuła
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Pearson Correlation ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Research Hypothesis ◽  
Local Government Finance ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Local Government Level ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Government Level

Research background: General grants in the system of local government finance should pursue five different functions. One of them is revenue equalization. This function is achieved if the revenue gap is reduced after the application of the subsidising mechanism. In addition, to be completed, the size of the support should be inversely proportional to own revenues. Purpose of the article: The aim of the article is to analyse the fulfilment of the revenue equalization function by general grants. Therefore, beside the theoretical analysis, which presents the general grants structure and the functions assigned to them, the article discusses the results of studies showing changes in the revenue gap after the application of the grant mechanism and the correlation between per capita own revenue and the amount of funds from selected parts (equalisation, balancing-regional, reserve, compensating) of the general grant. The following tentative research hypothesis was adopted: general grants fail to fulfil the revenue equalisation function. Methods: Two research methods were applied to achieve the aim of the article and verify the research hypothesis: descriptive statistics and correlation — calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient. Findings & Value added: Based on the analyses, it was concluded that, once the corrective and equalising mechanism was applied, the range between the extreme per capita revenue values was reduced by 40–50% on average, at all local government levels, i.e. at commune (including cities with county right), county and province levels, in each year from the period analysed, i.e. 2012–2016. The correlation between the sizes of revenue before and after budget subsidising is always negative, whereas the strength of the relationship ranged between low and significant, depending on the local government level. It was found that general grants do fulfil the revenue equalisation function, which contradicts the initially formulated research hypothesis.

scholarly journals Disparities by deprivation: The geographical impact of unprecedented changes in local authority financing on the voluntary sector in England

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110348
Author(s):  
David Clifford
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Voluntary Sector ◽  
Recent Change ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Disadvantaged Communities ◽  
Local Government Finance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Deprived Areas

Over the last decade, the local government finance system in England has experienced ‘genuinely revolutionary change’: overall revenues have declined and councils are now more reliant on locally raised taxes. Importantly, the nature of change has varied geographically: urban councils serving poorer communities have experienced the biggest declines in their service spending. This paper considers the impact of these spatially uneven changes on the voluntary sector. We follow through time charities known to be in receipt of local government funding at the time of peak council budgets in 2009–2010 and describe trends in the income of these charities until 2016–2017. We show that, just as the pattern of change in local government financing has been spatially uneven, so the trend in charities’ income has varied geographically. Indeed the spatially regressive nature of recent change in charities’ income is remarkable: while the median charity in the least deprived decile of the local authority distribution experienced little change in their income, the median charity in the most deprived decile experienced a 20% decline. The results provide the strongest evidence to date that, in countries with a history of partnership between government and the voluntary sector, voluntary organisations in more deprived areas are particularly vulnerable to sizeable reductions in the level of local government spending. Indeed, by illustrating for the first time the sizeable reductions in the income of charities in disadvantaged communities, the results demonstrate an important mechanism through which ‘austerity urbanism’ becomes salient in the lives of individuals in deprived areas.

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