Asymmetric yardstick competition: traditional procurement versus public-private partnerships

We consider local jurisdictions where rent-seeking administrators undertake identical infrastructure projects, choosing between two contractual arrangements: traditional procurement (TP) and public-private partnership (PPP). A yardstick competition mechanism is triggered through retrospective voters’ electoral decisions. A regime with TP in one jurisdiction and PPP in the other is likely to arise when projects are mildly lucrative and/or jurisdictions have moderate fiscal capacity. In this equilibrium, incumbents provide different levels of public services, face different re-election probabilities, and obtain different rents. By differentiating the project governance, incumbents specialize in rent extraction over time, thus hindering yardstick competition although jurisdictions are otherwise identical.

Political Budget Cycle, Tax Collection, and Yardstick Competition

This paper exploits the political cycle of Italian municipalities to test for the presence of strategic interactions in the collection of local taxation. The revenue from the personal income tax surcharge—a tax tool of low salience—is (positively) plagued by political manipulation and is found to be a strategic complement, but only when mayors run for re-election, a finding consistent with the yardstick competition hypothesis. More salient fiscal tools, such as property tax and user fees and charges, are also (negatively) affected by budget cycles, but they do not appear to be spatially correlated.

A Study of Interdisciplinary Dialog of Music and Dance in the 21st Century Turkey through Performed Examples

Power outages have negatively impacted the economy of Zambia through declining gross domestic product, loss of jobs and increased mortality rates. This case study provides some of the most crucial solutions to Zambia’s electricity supply deficit which include Yardstick competition and other alternative sources.

Neighbour effect: applicability of tax mimicking concept to setting tariffs for water provision in Poland

In our paper, tariff mimicking is interpreted as a specific type of yardstick competition. Local authorities compete for political capital and, in order to maintain (or increase) it, they compare their voter-sensitive policies with the policies of other local governments. The phenomenon of mimicking is related to the subject of inter-jurisdictional interactions. We try to identify the phenomenon of mimicking in local fees for water provision in Poland in the period 2013–2017. Our empirical strategy is based on two methods: spatial lag regression and a quasi-experimental design using a difference-indifferences method. In the latter method, we first identify local governments that have considerably increased their tariffs for water. Next, we compare whether their immediate neighbouring municipalities are more likely to follow the change than a ‘control group’ of similar, more distant, local governments. The results of our study confirm the existence of geographical interactions in the tariff policies of Polish local governments. Furthermore the results of our regression models confirm that ‘mimicking interactions’ are stronger in the case of tariffs for water provision than for local tax policies.