Key recommendations from 15 years of country surveys
The design of intergovernmental fiscal relations can help to ensure that tax and spending
powers are assigned in a way to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
Decentralisation can enable sub-central governments to provide better public services
for households and firms, while it can also make intergovernmental frameworks more
complex, harming equity. The challenges of fiscal federalism are multi-faceted and
involve difficult trade-offs. This synthesis paper consolidates much of the OECD’s
work on fiscal federalism over the past 15 years, with a particular focus on OECD
Economic Surveys. The paper identifies a range of good practices on the design of
country policies and institutions related strengthening fiscal capacity delineating
responsibilities across evels of government and improving intergovernmental co-ordination.