Suchergebnisse

Budgets are often thought of as boring, invoking the tedium of bookkeeping. The summer of 2020 suggested otherwise. As America's plague of police brutality combined with the death-dealing blows of the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of urban uprising gripped US cities, activists turned their organising attention to municipal budgeting. From Seattle to Atlanta, demands rang out for cities to #defund the police, rethink public safety and adopt budgets for the people. Since then, the people's budget movement has grown in strength at the municipal level, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Louisville, Jacksonville, Minneapolis and Nashville, among other cities. What should urban studies scholars make of these struggles and from the aspirations and visions that impel them? This paper uses a case study of the Nashville People's Budget Coalition (NPBC) to examine how municipal budgeting processes and public financing have become new sites of theorisation, debate and political intervention. We demonstrate how the people's budget movement offers a new calculus for municipal budgeting that radically reconceptualises the logics of value and care that underpin economic thought and public accounting practices. We conclude by considering avenues through which a scholarly agenda for economic democracy in solidarity with movement organisers could be expanded.

The paper investigates the existence of fiscal illusion in German municipalities with special focus on the revenues from local public enterprises. These shadow budgets tend to increase the misperception of municipal tax prices and seem to have been neglected in the literature. Therefore, an aggregated expenditure function has been estimated for all German independent cities applying an integrated budgetʺ approach, which means that revenues and expenditures of the core budget and the local public enterprises are combined to one single municipal budget. The estimation results suggest that a higher relative share of local public enterprise revenues might increase total per capita spending as well as spending for nonobligatory municipal goods and services. Empirical evidence for other sources of fiscal illusion is mixed but some indications for debt illusion, renter illusion or the flypaper effect could be found. -- fiscal illusion ; municipal enterprises ; panel data regression