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Local governments in the U.S. rely less on the property tax than they have historically. This long-term trend has been accompanied by important shifts in the composition of local revenues. While the property tax still serves as one primary source of local government revenue, increasingly other sources are used to pay for local government. This paper first examines that trend, the forces behind it, and its regional impact. We then explore trends in three central states - - Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas -- that have experienced substantial revenue shifts in recent years. A concluding section discusses the options for the future.

An earlier study found that certain Minnesota state aid programs stimulated city property tax levies to a high degree. If this is accurate, it suggests potentially serious problems with state property tax relief efforts. This article re-examines this question and finds that most aid programs have little direct effect on property tax levies. However, certain aid formulas that reduce the effective price of property taxes do indirectly stimulate property taxes. Therefore, states need to be careful in designing aid programs intended to reduce property taxes.

This paper examines trends in local government revenues and current challenges that local governments face in raising revenue. We alsolook into the future in an effort to make recommendations to localgovernments regarding their revenue structure. Important trends that wedocument include a long-term decline in the property tax and an increase inboth state aid and user charges. Recent economic changes present seriouschallenges for local governments due to volatility of sales taxes, decreasesin property values, and threats to state aid. As local governments shape theirrevenue structure, they will need to respond to external economic,technological and demographic changes. Only user charges offer hopefulprospects as a productive revenue source.

Are states effectively managing contracting and procurement activities? Are they striking the right balance between central administrative control and empowerment through delegation? How effective is training and monitoring? How do these practices compare to the principles of best practice? What role will information technology play in the future for procurement and contracting? As part of the Government Performance Project, budget, procurement, and contracting managers in 48 states were surveyed, providing descriptions of their procurement and contracting practices. There are numerous developments that speak to the practical details of contemporary public management. Five key findings are (1) information technology needs are challenging states, with some responding well, but others struggling, (2) in most states staff training needs to be improved, (3) restrictions prohibiting “best value” purchasing need to be removed, (4) states can learn from and improve practices by partnering with other governments and private organizations, and (5) most states use a hybrid of both centralized and decentralized management structures when it comes to contracting and procurement.

This article reviews the politics of government-business relations in the US from 1776 to the present. It argues that two major political interests, the agrarian democrats and the nationalist Whigs, created the context for discussion of economic policy that continues today. At times, pragmatic compromises have resolved the differences between these interests. The lessons from this history are instructive for today, and suggest potentially viable policies and coalitions to address business issues.

This paper argues that the search for a theory of public budgeting has proceeded mainly on assumptions of the rationalist paradigm. This approach yielded mostly technical explanations for budgeting phenomena. These explanations fail to capture the complexities of public budgeting and yield incomplete theories. Without attempting to break new ground, the authors argue that budgeting theory should be guided by heuristic concepts borrowed from open systems theory. This offers greater potential for reconciling the rational and non-rational aspects of budgeting and permits constructive synthesis of insights from extant theories of budgeting without rejecting the rationalist paradigm. This approach views budgeting as only one of the complex functions governments perform to cope with their environment and to maintain stability.

To boost the fiscal revenue, i.e., government revenue over GDP and central government revenue over government total revenue, China conducted the 1994 fiscal reforms. According to some observers, the results of the initial reforms were mixed. This study reveals, contrary to most examinations of previous studies, the 1994 fiscal reforms have been an enormous success in achieving the original policy purposes, although remaining problems still present a daunting task for the Chinese government. This paper examines the factors triggering the 1994 fiscal reforms, reveals the contents and accomplishments of the reforms, explores unfinished tasks and ultimately proposes some policy implications.

Decentralization has been a continual focus of attention of both scholars and practitioners for more than half a century. Even though there is a general agreement on what decentralization is, there is no consensus about how it should be measured. This article builds on the existing body of literature that specifies three major dimensions of decentralization: political, administrative, and economic. The article offers a measurement model that unifies these dimensions in a meaningful manner that allows for comparison across countries. The proposed model is then empirically tested using confirmatory factor analysis of a data set of 37 countries over the period 2000-2009. This factor analysis reveals that there are, in fact, only two dimensions of the decentralization process. The newly developed modelʼs index illustrates that the conceptually challenging processes of decentralization can be accurately measured and analyzed. The index can be used for hypothesis testing of the causality role of decentralization.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

On many occasions, organizational science research has been referred to as fragmented and disjointed, resulting in a literature that is, in the opinion of many, difficult to navigate and comprehend. One potential explanation is that scholars have failed to comprehend that organizations are complex and intricate systems. In order to move us past this morass, we recommend that researchers extend beyond traditional rational, mechanistic, and variable-centered approaches to research and integrate a more advantageous pattern-oriented approach within their research program. Pattern-oriented methods approximate real-life phenomena by adopting a holistic, integrative approach to research wherein individual- and organizational-systems are viewed as non-decomposable organized wholes. We argue that the pattern-oriented approach has the potential to overcome a number of breakdowns faced by alternate approaches, while offering a novel and more representative lens from which to view organizational- and HRM-related issues. The proposed incorporation of the pattern-oriented approach is framed within a review and evaluation of current approaches to organizational research and is supplemented with a discussion of methodological and theoretical implications as well as potential applications of the pattern-oriented approach.