Assessing Federal Transfers' Role in the Subnational Budget System of the Russian Federation

摘要

Subfederal authorities' financial independence is an essential condition for their effective functioning. Currently, in Russia, the procedure of inter-budgetary regulation is excessively centralized, and the share of transfers in the structure of regional revenues is high. At the same time, subfederal budgets are the basic level of the budget system, which concentrates the main part of socially significant expenditures. In this regard, the development of a comprehensive tool for the empirical analysis of tax revenues and the effectiveness of inter-budget transfers, undertaken in the study, seems relevant. The purpose of the research is to develop an economic and statistical apparatus for assessing the results of transferring interbudget transfers from the federal budget to the constituent entities of the Federation. Achieving this goal required to: consider the features of the structure of budget revenues in the regions; determine the scale of the territories' budget revenues heterogeneity, and give its quantitative assessment; identify the directions of the federal center's transfer policy; find out the nature of gratuitous transfers impact on the regional budgets. The novelty of the presented work is the creation of an economic and statistical apparatus for the study of the impact of federal budget policy on the region's public finance. This allowed us to characterize gratuitous transfers from the federal budget to the regions and determine whether there is a motivation to increase tax revenues in the Russian Federation's subjects or not. It is concluded that improving inter-budgetary relations should include measures to strengthen the Russian regions' tax potential, which is impossible if the stability of securing tax revenues is not ensured. Authorities need measures to prevent a direct correlation between actual and projected budget revenues and expenditures and the volume of transfers received from the federal budget to equalize budget security. The results of the research can be used to study the possibilities of improving budget policy in the direction of equalizing and stimulating the regions to strengthen their own revenue base.