Tax effort of local governments and its determinants: The Spanish case

We have implemented frontier techniques to analyse the local tax effort and its determinants. The results show that municipalities have been quite responsible on average (tax efforts between 72-85 percent), although most municipalities can increase their tax efforts both making a more intensive use of their tax authority and improving the efficiency of their tax collection. To respond to the financing problems of municipalities near the tax frontier, it would be desirable to reform the legal framework to allow a greater tax capacity while leaving the decision on how to use this potential in hands of each unit of government