Financial Self-Sufficiency in Ibero-American Capital Cities

Abstract

This paper analyzes the financial self-sufficiency of a group of Ibero-American capital cities based on the methodological definitions proposed by the Local Autonomy Index (LAI). This is an indicator developed for the study of the municipal systems of 39 countries of the pan-European space (Ladner, Keuffer and Baldersheim 2015). This methodology is made up of eleven measurement variables; institutional density, scope of responsibility in the provision of policies, effective political discretion, fiscal autonomy, financial transfer system, financial self-sufficiency, autonomy in matters of indebtedness, organizational autonomy, legal protection, administrative supervision and access to central government.

In the Ibero-American sphere, different research projects have demonstrated the feasibility of applying this methodology, among them the one financed by the Center for Latin American Studies of the Autonomous University of Madrid on "Measuring the Degree of Municipal Decentralization in Ibero-America" ​​stands out. based on the Local Autonomy Index" (Navarro Gómez, 2017) and the one based at the National University of Quilmes "Municipal Autonomy Measurement System in Ibero-America" ​​(Cravacuore, 2019)

This work takes up the sixth variable of the LAI methodology through the analysis of financial self-sufficiency, understood as the extent to which the local government's budgetary resources come from its own resources (Ladner et al., 2018). To weight the analyzed variable, financial data corresponding to the 2020 budget year of the Comú de Andorra la Vella, in Andorra, has been collected; the Municipality of the City of Asunción, Paraguay; the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Government of the Federal District of Brasilia, Brazil; the Municipality of Guatemala City, in the country of the same name; the City Council of Madrid, Spain; the Municipality of Montevideo, Uruguay; the Municipality of the Metropolitan District of Quito; and the Municipality of San Juan, Puerto Rico.