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- Title
Public Policy and the Urban Fiscal Problem: Piecemeal vs. Aggregate Solutions.
- Authors
Bahl, Roy W.
- Abstract
A necessary first step toward resolving the financial crisis facing U.S. cities is a proper definition of the urban fiscal problem, i.e., a separation of fiscal problems of metropolitan areas from those which exist by virtue of metropolitanism. The basic objective of this article is to explore implications of piecemeal versus aggregative approaches to resolving the fiscal ills of metropolitan regions. Since a necessary prerequisite to discussion of any urban public policy is a systematic definition of disparities problem, the following section is given over to developing rudiments of a theory of metropolitan fiscal imbalance. This conceptual framework is then used to evaluate, in general terms, that current governmental policy which is geared to alleviate the fiscal plight of central cities and to examine grounds (equity and efficiency) on which such a concoction of isolated corrective devices might be preferable to an aggregative approach. The urban fiscal problem must relate to the compounding of general social imbalance by metropolitanism, i.e., by the fragmentation of local government and the spatial clustering of both ends of the income distribution within the Standard Metropolitan Area.
- Subjects
UNITED States; URBAN policy; FINANCIAL crises; CITIES &; towns; FISCAL policy; METROPOLITAN areas; POLITICAL planning; INNER cities
- Publication
Land Economics, 1970, Vol 46, Issue 1, p41
- ISSN
0023-7639
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/3145422