This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of the respective roles of different levels of government in expenditure functions, guided by recent theoretical developments on the political economy of partial expenditure decentralization. We adopt a theoretical framework in which the degree of expenditure decentralization is endogenous and depends, in equilibrium, on the relative political conditions prevailing at each level of government. Consistent with the model’s predictions, empirical results from a panel of Canadian provinces show that the share of total expenditure in a province assumed by the provincial government increases with the electoral strength of the provincial government and decreases with the electoral strength of the federal government, in addition to being affected significantly by the partisan affiliation of both levels of government. A series of alternative empirical specifications, including an IV regression exploiting campaign spending data, are presented to assess the robustness of these results.

本文以部分支出分权的政治经济学的最新理论发展为指导，对不同级别的政府在支出功能中各自作用的根本决定因素进行了实证研究。我们采用一种理论框架，其中支出分权的程度是内生的，并且在均衡情况下取决于各级政府的相对政治条件。与模型的预测一致，来自加拿大各省的小组的经验结果表明，由省政府承担的省内总支出的份额随省政府的选举实力而增加，而随联邦政府的选举实力而降低，除了受到两级政府的党派关系的重大影响之外。提出了一系列可供选择的经验指标，包括利用运动支出数据进行的IV回归，以评估这些结果的稳健性。