Causes and Features on the Reform of American Inter-government Transfer Payment

摘要

Different from most transfer payment patterns in other countries, American inter-government transfer payment adopts the condition based pattern, mainly concerned with block grants. This article summarizes the background and causes of the reform of block grants and points out its characteristics during the evolvement process in recent decades. The analysis shows that the appearance and stable development of block grants have changed the original transfer pattern of which the categorical grants were dominant, resulting in a distribution phase and consisting of both categorical and block grants with conditional payment and equal scale.