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This collection of papers by leading experts, emerging scholars, and policy makers in the field of municipal taxation and finance sets out the financial challenges facing municipalities in Canada today and examines various practical means of navigating these challenges.
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As experience with decentralization has accumulated, perceptions of both the problems that often accompany decentralization and the best ways to deal with them have evolved. This book draws on experiences in developing countries to bridge the gap between the conventional textbook treatment of fiscal decentralization and the actual practice of subnational government finance.
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Bringing together perspectives and case studies from across Canada, the US, and Europe, IMFG's new book Financing Infrastructure: Who Should Pay? contends that users, not taxpayers, should start paying directly for their cities’ repairs and expansions.
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Detailing the development of municipal institutions, the original logic behind the city-county separation, and the eventual shift in institutional and municipal organization, this book demonstrates that urban and rural areas have always had a reciprocal relationship and that both play an important role in the strength of the national economy and the broader local community. Focusing on three case studies of separated cities and their counties that still retain strict city-county separation, former IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow Zachary Spicer reveals how this policy works, what problems it poses, and examines the best practices for addressing growth, development, and sprawl from a regional perspective.
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In an era when all large cities are struggling to maintain balanced budgets and pay for increased services and infrastructure, Is Your City Healthy? is a timely publication that explores the elements of fiscal health, how we measure it, and why it is important.
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This volume examines the governing structure and finances of metropolitan areas in federal systems. Taking a comparative approach, each chapter examines two large metropolitan areas in a federal country, including Australia (South East Queensland and Perth); Brazil (Belo Horizonte and São Paulo); Canada (Toronto and Vancouver); Germany (Hamburg and Central Germany); India (Hyderabad and Mumbai); South Africa (Cape Town and Gauteng metropolitan region); Spain (Barcelona and Madrid); Switzerland (Geneva and Zurich); and the United States (Louisville and Los Angeles).
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The Ontario Municipal Board is an independent provincial planning appeals body that has wielded major influence on Toronto’s urban development. In this book, IMFG Fellow Aaron A. Moore examines the effect that the OMB has had on the behavior and relationships of Toronto’s main political actors, including city planners, developers, neighbourhood associations, and local politicians.
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This book examines the broad reform of the Ontario property tax in 1998. The objectives of this reform included introducing a full market value assessment, establishing a property tax system that would be widely accepted, and removing property tax reform from the provincial political agenda. Although the reform effort was lauded by experts at the time, its overall objectives were not achieved. In fact, the new assessment system may have ultimately weakened the role of the local property tax. Good property tax design needs to recognize the important differences between taxing housing and taxing business property.
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