Austerity and Its Consequences in Local

Conceptualizing high local fiscal stress as a variable which includes low fiscal capacity, high local tax effort and high local need requires building a typology reflecting this conceptualization. This study builds such a typology for 166 counties in the northeastern UnitLd States and examines the effects of variables taken from a series of popular hypotheses regarding local fiscal stress. Findings show that the category with the largest effect on local fiscal stress is per capita expenditures for highways. Other causal factors include: high local. demand for services (e.g. education, welfare); location (rural localities suffer from more local fiscal stress than metropolitan localities); high local needs (e.g. unemployment and crowded housing); and high centralization of formal political influence and authority. However, local fiscal stress is comparatively lower in manufacturin