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Local Government Finance: Some Political Aspects: A Case Study of Punjab
This book carefully analyzes a large range of data on local government's income, expenditure, grants, etc. The author focuses on the rise of these and other new challenges and explains clearly why Pakistan must adopt a more comprehensive and viable structure of local government.
250 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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January 15, 2015
Three stars for covering an important and otherwise understudied aspect of Pakistani government, but this ultimately raises more questions for me than it answers, and 2.5 stars is probably more accurate given some of the material's organization, which was not entirely intuitive. This was published just after the Musharraf government's 2000 restructuring of local government bodies (the order doing so is included in a thirty-page appendix) so cannot offer much analysis on that system's impacts. The normative arguments sprinkled throughout regarding the ideal purpose and structure of local government overshadows the analysis of the actual structures in places, although this study correctly centers the importance of budgets and revenues for the analysis of the autonomy and power of local bodies. Although it makes some references to local government systems in other countries, I would've liked more direct comparative analysis of the way Pakistan has structured its local revenue systems, and what implications that has had elsewhere for similar states.
Most of the tax revenue and grant data in here (which comprises a lot of the material) are now out of date, but the rising share of grant transfers (after the abolition of the octroi and zilla internal customs tariffs in 1998) and the implications for local government autonomy are noted in the final chapter, as are the high administrative expenditures of most local units. A history of pre-independence local government structures offers some historical context; then as now, these bodies ultimately operated largely at the mercy of the central or provincial-level civil service bureaucracy. If nothing else, this can serve as a reference for laying out the various rural and urban local government units (which some provinces have reverted to after the expiration of the Musharraf system in 2009), and the various types of tax (primarily property) that they generate revenue from.
Most of the tax revenue and grant data in here (which comprises a lot of the material) are now out of date, but the rising share of grant transfers (after the abolition of the octroi and zilla internal customs tariffs in 1998) and the implications for local government autonomy are noted in the final chapter, as are the high administrative expenditures of most local units. A history of pre-independence local government structures offers some historical context; then as now, these bodies ultimately operated largely at the mercy of the central or provincial-level civil service bureaucracy. If nothing else, this can serve as a reference for laying out the various rural and urban local government units (which some provinces have reverted to after the expiration of the Musharraf system in 2009), and the various types of tax (primarily property) that they generate revenue from.
Displaying 1 of 1 review