Taxation and the Unequal Reach of the State: Mapping State Capacity in Ecuador

Even though the unequal reach of the state has become an important concern in the literature on developing democracies in Latin America, empirical measures of intracountry variation in state capacity are scarce. So far, attempts to develop valid measures of the reach of the state have often been hampered by inadequate data. Leveraging insights from national‐level scholarship, this article proposes a tax‐based measure to capture such intracountry variation. Drawing on a comprehensive data set of municipal finance and estimates of economic activity derived from nighttime lights, it maps state capacity in Ecuador. The article validates the measure on the basis of survey data collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project. A multilevel analysis demonstrates that citizens tend to be more satisfied with the services provided by the state in municipalities with higher state capacity, which strengthens confidence that the measure picks up relevant differences.     

Fiscal Capacity and Tax Effort of the American States: Trends and Issues

The author examines the historic context of state taxing power and fiscal capacity, and the current efforts of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations to measure fiscal capacity and tax effort using a Representative Tax System (RTS). The two most commonly used methods of distributing federal aid to states are population and personal income, both incomplete measures of fiscal capacity. RTS estimates how much revenue each state and its localities would raise if it levied the national average tax rate for commonly used state and local taxes. The author considers the strengths and weakness of RTS as a measure of fiscal capacity and examines state rankings and trends since 1975.     

A tool to evaluate state capacity in post‐communist countries, 1989–2006

In an attempt to bring together the research on state capacity, this article proposes a five‐item index to operationalise and measure the concept of state capacity. The index was constructed for 26 post‐communist countries on a yearly basis from their first year of independence from communist rule to 2006. Different states unavoidably display dissimilar levels of aptitude in the different domains of state capacity, but the aggregated index of state capacity presented is high in both validity and reliability. With the help of this index, the starting conditions as well as the evolution of state capacity within the countries included in this study are explored, with three conclusions. First, post‐communist countries emerged displaying very contrasting levels of state capacity. Second, the level of state capacity has remained relatively stable within most countries between 1989–1991 and 2006, which ties in the last conclusion that the initial level of state capacity is the strongest determinant of subsequent levels of state capacity. All three conclusions carry important implications for research using state capacity either as an independent or as a dependent variable.     

The Quality of Management and Government Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the American States

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public administration, and political science. Government's administrative arrangements and managerial behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, considering public management's effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School's Government Performance Project to examine the relationship between state governments' managerial capacity and a measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state management capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely (that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place managerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influence on government activities.     

Measuring High-Technology Capacity Across the 50 States

This study conceptualizes and operationalizes state high-technology capacity and demonstrates its potential usefulness in comparative state studies. The analysis is primarily concerned with identifying and recording the amount of high-technology resources that are available in each state and that can be employed in public policy. Drawing upon a host of likely indicators of high-technology availability, the study identifies five dimensions of the concept and ranks the states along these dimensions. The work then analyzes the relationships between the five components of high-technology capacity and several state energy and environmental policies. Suggestions for future research are included at the end of the study.     

From Leviathan to Gulliver? The Decline of the Developmental State in Brazil

This article advances an institutionalist explanation for the decline of Brazil's developmental state, showing how an initially strong state undermined its own strength over time. The Brazilian state greatly expanded its interventionism and fragmented society—through state-corporatist mechanisms—in order to enhance its power to guide development. Yet the mushrooming state apparatus increasingly lacked internal coordination. This disunity diminished the state's capacity to attain its goals and provided added opportunities for the fragmented social groups created by the state's divide-and-rule strategies to "capture" public agencies. The resulting weakening of the state is evident in taxation, the policy focus of this article. Competing state agencies granted proliferating tax privileges, and business sectors supported by clientelist politicians blocked governmental efforts to maintain or raise the tax burden. This decline in extractive capacity contributed to the fiscal crisis that has paralyzed Brazil's developmental state since the early 1980s.     

Tackling unemployment in China: state capacity and governance issues

Abstract

This paper considers China's state capacity and changing governance as revealed through its policies to tackle unemployment. Despite high levels of growth, economic restructuring has resulted in rising unemployment over the last decade. The Chinese state has been able to manage job losses from state enterprises, demonstrating some state capacity in relation to this sector and some persistent command economy governance mechanisms. However both design and implementation of policies to compensate and assist particular groups among the unemployed have been shaped by weak state capacity in several other areas. First, capacity to gather accurate employment data is limited, meaning local and central governments do not have a good understanding of the extent and nature of unemployment. Second, the sustainability of supposedly mandatory unemployment insurance schemes is threatened by poor capacity to enforce participation. Third, poor central state capacity to ensure local governments implement policies effectively leads to poor unemployment insurance fund capacity, resulting in provision for only a narrow segment of the unemployed and low quality employment services. Although the adoption of unemployment insurance (and its extension to employers and employees in the private sector), the introduction of a Labour Contract Law in 2007, and the delivery of employment services by private businesses indicate a shift towards the use of new governance mechanisms based on entitlement, contract and private sector delivery of public-sector goods, that shift is undermined by poor state capacity in relation to some of these new mechanisms.     

State First,Then Democracy: Using Cadastral Records to Explain Governmental Performance in Public Goods Provision

This article presents a theoretical argument of how and why democratization at different levels of state capacity matters for public goods provision and subjects the argument to empirical tests. Building on rational choice theories of public goods production, we argue that credible enforcement before credible commitment—democratizing after the state has acquired high levels of state capacity—leads to a more efficient social order than the opposite sequence. Using a theoretically grounded and novel indicator of historical state capacity—the extent and quality of cadastral records—the analysis shows that those countries where the state developed extensive enforcement capacities before democratization exhibit, on average, better provision of essential public goods and are less corrupt.     

Informing State Economic Development Policy in the New Economy: A Theoretical Foundation and Empirical Examination of State Innovation in the United States

This study considers recent evidence of state innovation capacity in order to better understand where new economy–type economic development is likely to occur and, by extrapolation, where strategies geared toward such growth are more likely to succeed. The research focuses on data from the National Science Foundation's State Science and Engineering Profiles, supplemented by data from other sources. Factor analysis was performed on this data set to observe underlying common factors that explain the variability of the original data in fewer dimensions. The resulting factor scores—human capacity and financial capacity—were used to classify states into four categories of new economy resource density: lagging, low, developing, and progressive. The scores for the two resulting factors were then used as independent variables in subsequent regression analyses, demonstrating positive correlations among innovation capacity resources, actual innovations, and overall state economic performance.     

Civic Networks, Legitimacy and the Policy Process

In ethnically divided developing countries, avenues permitting popular participation in the policy process seem essential if the state is to be viewed as legitimate. Frequently, however, mechanisms intended to build legitimacy by providing for popular participation fail to achieve this target. This article analyzes the policy process in Mauritius, and argues that it combines characteristics of both policy networks and civil society. We term this form of popular consultation on policy a "civic network," and we present research which suggests that it has been successful in building legitimacy. By comparing this civic network with other forms of popular participation, we are able to identify the characteristics which seem to make it more effective. The effects of popular participation on the policy capacity of a state are more mixed, but in the case of Mauritius, we conclude that by increasing legitimacy, the civic network also increased state policy capacity.     

Right,the state and the conception of the person

The contemporary world‐historical epoch involves both the universal extension of the state type of organization of society, and the development of a universal idea of the person in the discourse of human rights. The status of the person requires positive constitution, and such constitution requires an idea of the state that informs the actual working of states. The idea of the state cannot be developed unless the natural right conception of the basis of personhood is abandoned. Nor can the idea of the state be developed if it continues to be confused with the idea of the nation. Hegel offers us an idea of the state that we can continue to build. For Hegel the state denotes both the institutional reality of the state and the subjectivity that is required if the idea of the state is to be actualized. There is a dialectical relationship between the adequacy of the state‐centered institutional order for the effective support and facilitation of personhood and our subjective capacity to be and act as persons. Thus, processes by which the idea of the state is undermined are not independent of subjective experience and our willingness to be and act as persons.     

The public sector growth and state autonomy in Western Europe: The changing role and scope of the state in Ireland since 1950

The expansion of the state in advanced industrial societies since 1945 has stimulated studies of the determinants of public sector growth, the nature of state intervention and the capacity for the state to act in a quasi‐autonomous way. The last also provides a means for distinguishing between alternative models of state action. In this article the issues of state expansion and state autonomy are used as the basis for examining the growth of the public sector and shifting activities of the state in Ireland since 1950. It is argued that a state‐centred model best accounts for the behaviour of the Irish state.     

Conceptualising State Capacity: Comparing Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

Strengthening the state is central to the post-communist reform agenda. Here, state capacity combines organisational, material and social resources and is conceptualised along four dimensions: ideational, political, technical and implementational. This conceptualisation is applied to a comparative, survey-based analysis in 2002 of 125 medium-ranking officials in two post- communist Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The findings reveal that although Kazakhstan's controlled economic reform programme and natural resources have placed it in a stronger position to develop its state capacity, important ideational, political and implementational problems pose long-term obstacles for reform. In turn, Kyrgyzstan's early liberalisation in the absence of economic and social resources may be serving to undermine its state capacity.     

The Federal, and the State and Local Roles in Government Expenditures

This article compares government expenditures by functional category of the federal government relative to state and local governments and the changes in their respective roles since 1955. The article includes a review of the federal role relative to the state and local role on a function-by-function basis for these three and a half decades. This analysis demonstrates considerable stability in the federal sector and the state and local sector, but also the capacity for change.     

Equity under and state responses to the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986

A difficult problem facing states with significant commercial hazardous waste treatment and disposal capacity is the inflow of waste into the state for disposal. The states with commercial capacity allege that other states are reluctant to aggressively pursue siting facilities, and in fact may be impeding development through restrictive siting provisions. Likewise, capacity states are frustrated with the Environmental Protection Agency for its perceived inaction in reviewing state siting standards. Equity discussion abounds at the state level. Capacity states hoped that equity would be elevated to federal debate through Section 104(k) of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986. I examine equity and review hazardous waste management in a federalism context to discern the relationship between EPA and the states. I focus on the different roles EPA and the states perceived for the other during implementation of Section 104(k). I conclude with an evaluation of how equity was handled under the new legislation and what remains to be done.Research for this article was supported by the Tennessee Department of Health and Environment and the Waste Management Research and Education Institute at the University of Tennessee. I appreciate the comments provided by David L. Feldman and the anonymous Reviewers. The research assistance of Susan Bohm Seylar is gratefully acknowledged.     

Capital Blight? The Regulation of Financial Institutions in Italy and Canada

The pressures of globalization and capital flight create two sets of challenges for national state structures. They are seen fo limit the boundaries of state action, and within those boundaries, they lead to a transfer of regulatory capacity to supra and/or subnational structures. The article explores the second set of challenges and asks whether globalization has led to uniform changes in the regulatory capacity of national states in the area of financial institutions. It argues that the Italian and Canadian experiences suggest that political and institutional factors may shape how national states respond to the pressure to shift regulatory capacity to structures at some other level. In the Italian case, the emergence of a single market for banking in Europe led to a strengthening of the state's policymaking capacity. In Canada, on the other hand, the federal government's authority was limited by competition with provincial regulatory regimes. Globalization may limit the boundaries of state action, but this does not necessarily mean that those boundaries will not be occupied primarily by national state structures.     

External Actors and the Provision of Public Health Services in Somalia

Concentrating on the health sector, this article argues that the provision of collective goods through external actors depends on the level of state capacity and the complexity of the service that external actors intend to provide. It shows that external actors can contribute most effectively to collective good provision when the service is simple, and that simple services can even be provided under conditions of failed statehood. Effectively delivering complex services requires greater levels of state capacity. The article also indicates that legitimacy is a key factor to explain variance in health service delivery. To demonstrate this, the article assesses health projects in Somalia. It shows that simple services—malaria prevention and tuberculosis control—are provided effectively in all three Somali regions, including the war‐torn South‐Central region. In contrast, the HIV/AIDS project only achieved substantial results in Somaliland, the only region with a comparatively higher level of state capacity, and failed in the South‐Central region and Puntland.     

Balancing Governance Capacity and Legitimacy: How the Norwegian Government Handled the COVID-19 Crisis as a High Performer

This essay addresses how the Norwegian government has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Compared with many other countries, Norway has performed well in handling the crisis. This must be understood in the context of competent politicians, a high-trust society with a reliable and professional bureaucracy, a strong state, a good economic situation, a big welfare state, and low population density. The Norwegian government managed to control the pandemic rather quickly by adopting a suppression strategy, followed by a control strategy, based on a collaborative and pragmatic decision-making style, successful communication with the public, a lot of resources, and a high level of citizen trust in government. The alleged success of the Norwegian case is about the relationship between crisis management capacity and legitimacy. Crisis management is most successful when it is able to combine democratic legitimacy with government capacity.     

Management problems of the proliferation of local government in Nigeria

Local government throughout Nigeria was reconstituted on a uniform basis in 1976. The 1979 Constitution then empowered state governments to create new local governments. This article describes how the state governments have used their authority to proliferate the number of local governments; it explains the reasons for doing this both on the part of state governments and on that of local communities. The drive to create additional local governments has derived in part from a desire to promote local level development, yet enquiries into the managerial capacity of existing local governments suggest that this expectation will be frustrated.     

The Forgotten Regional Organizations: Creating Capacity for Economic Development

Government capacity helps explain variance in public sector organizations' performance, and measuring capacity helps identify deficiencies that may be addressed in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these organizations. This study examines the capacity of regional economic development districts to leverage federal grant funds in the counties they serve, controlling for additional sources of potential capacity and demand for federal grants. A decade of data reflecting federal grant funding to counties in one state was compiled from the Federal Awards Data System and analyzed using pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis with panel-corrected standard errors. The results indicate that regional economic development districts demonstrate varied but significant capacity to leverage federal grant funds in the counties they serve. The results suggest that similarity in the purpose and structure of regional economic development districts within a state are not enough; we need to better understand the resources within the organization and the mission that determines how those resources are applied.