Fiscal transfer in Canada: Drawing comparisons and lessons
The Canadian system of fiscal transfers, which has been developed over a long period of time, has two central features: equalisation grants, which are constitutionally guaranteed, and the Canadian Health and Social Service Transfers (CHST). This paper examines the relevance and applicability of the Canadian system of intergovernmental transfers in the Indian case. Equalisation grants are meant to ensure that provinces have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation. An elaborate `Representative Tax System' approach using individual revenue bases is used in Canada for determining the equalisation grants, although there has recently been a debate to use a more macro approach. The source by source approach is less practical in the Indian case for want of comparable and reliable information required for applying the method. A more practical alternative is the macro approach, which is adopted in India, but better indicators of fiscal capacity than those based on GSDP need to be used. In addition, the concept of ensuring that resources are available for maintaining the per capita expenditure of select basic services at certain levels among states, as attempted in Canada through the CHST transfers, is worth exploring.
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Bird, Richard M., 1993. "Threading the Fiscal Labyrinth: Some Issues in Fiscal Decentralization," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 46(2), pages 207-27, June.
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:npf:wpaper:04/18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (S.Siva Chidambaram)
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.