March 2007

Upcoming

On April 17 – 20 the CFP conducts its annual seminar for professionals from Financial Departments of the administrations of the subjects of RF. This year experts from the federal agencies and from the CFP will cover subjects as Strategic planning and socio-economic reforms; Mid-term financial planning; Practical implementation of the performance-based budgeting; Monitoring and evaluation of quality of public services delivering; Regional schemes of intergovernmental transfers.

Projects

The CFP has selected pilot municipalities for the projects “Implementation of the budget and administrative reforms on local level”. The selected municipalities include the city of Ussurisk (Primorsky Krai, the Far East federal district), Nadezhdinsky municipal district (Primorsky Krai, the Far East federal district), and the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsk (Kamchatskaya oblast).
More about the project

Intergovernmental Reform in Russia 2000-2006. Presented by Galina Kurlyandskaya at the Conference “Competition versus Cooperation: German Federalism in Need of Reform – a Comparative Perspective”, October 18th – 20th, 2006, Berlin

Russia is a state that enjoys diverse climatic, geographic, economic, cultural and historical conditions. As a result, people living in various regions have different preferences for public goods, while the federal center cannot effectively identify priorities for the population of each region. These are the arguments in favor of a highly decentralized governance of the public sector in Russia. On the other hand, the Russian regions vary considerably in terms of tax base and fiscal capacity. Great disparity in economic situation of the regions calls for the federal center to reallocate financial resources. The reallocation function of the budgetary system becomes even more important owing to the uneven economic growth of Russian regions and changes in their population sizes in the medium-term perspective. The combination of arguments in favor and against decentralization requires from the long-term intergovernmental fiscal policy to be flexible enough to provide for a minimum level of public service financing in depressive regions and, at the same time, to stimulate economic growth in regions and municipalities demonstrating dynamic development. In order to achieve the optimal balance between the two goals it is necessary to accomplish a set of tasks including both a better assignment of expenditure responsibilities across the federal center, regions and municipalities and an improved allocation of revenue sources across the different tiers of government. At the same time, the structure of the IGFR equalization system should not create soft budgetary constraints. It also should minimize negative fiscal stimuli on the part of subnational authorities.
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