Understanding municipal fiscal health: A model for local governments in the USA. By Craig S.Maher, SunghoPark, Bruce D.McDonaldIII, Steven C.Deller, New York: Routledge. 2023. pp. 350. $61.99 (paperback) and $160 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781032055428
该书首次综合了地方政府财政状况的零散文献，提出了一个包含输入、输出、结果和政策响应的开放系统模型，用于评估市政财政健康，并通过多个美国城市案例展示了应用。
Local governments are critical to the operation of any modern society. They provide essential public services in education, healthcare, public safety, transportation, and other functional areas, and can respond to residents' needs and preferences, often faster and more efficiently than higher levels of government (Oates, 1999). However, in competitive federalist systems, not all local governments are equally successful. Some municipalities, leveraging favorable external conditions and implementing growth-oriented policies, manage to attract mobile capital and labor, ensuring sustainable local development. Others are hindered by unfavorable environmental or demographic factors, poorly designed policies, fiscal pressures from more successful neighbors, and numerous state-imposed restrictions, leading to chronic fiscal challenges. Understanding how to diagnose the fiscal problems of local governments and measure their fiscal health thus becomes a vital task for government officials, academics, and financial analysts. Understanding Municipal Fiscal Health by Maher, Park, McDonald III, and Deller is the first attempt to synthesize vast and fragmented literature on local government financial condition and to propose a novel and comprehensive approach to assessing municipal fiscal health that can be used by both academics and practitioners. The authors summarize existing frameworks for fiscal condition analysis (Berne & Schramm, 1986; Hendrick, 2011; Honadle et al., 2003; Nollenberger et al., 2003) and introduce an open-systems model that consists of inputs (municipal fiscal environments that are shaped by socioeconomic conditions, institutional settings, external pressures, and internal structures), outputs (municipal revenue, expenditure, and debt trends that are affected by municipal fiscal decisions and structures), outcomes (various measures of fiscal health and stress, including those related to revenues and expenditures, operating position, and long-term liabilities), and policy actions in response to fiscal challenges and crises. Each element of this open-systems model is analyzed in a separate chapter. In their discussion of municipal fiscal environments (Chapter 2), the authors pay special attention to the institutional structure of American fiscal federalism (also see Johnson et al. (2021) for a similar discussion on municipal debt markets) and, particularly, to the oversight role of states in local fiscal matters. They provide a useful typology of various state-imposed fiscal rules, including municipal tax and expenditure limits (TELs), balanced budget requirements, and debt limits, that significantly impact local fiscal decisions and create substantial heterogeneity among states and regions of the United States. Chapters 4–6 provide an overview of existing approaches to measuring fiscal health, fiscal stress, and fiscal condition trends (Maher & Nollenberger, 2009; Wang et al., 2007) and recommend a selection of the 10 most important financial ratios to assess fiscal health of any given municipality that is somewhat different from the Brown's 10-point test and the Wang, Dennis, and Tu's solvency test. These ratios cover (1) revenues and expenditures, including total per capita receipts and outlays as well as the shares of property taxes and intergovernmental aid in total revenues, (2) the operating position, including general fund deficit (surplus) and several measures of unrestricted short-term assets, and (3) long-term liabilities, including relative measures of general obligation debt, debt service costs, and noncurrent liabilities. Since some of the terms used by academics and practitioners are confusing, the authors discuss the differences between fiscal health and fiscal stress, noting that “fiscal health is not a single measurement, but rather a spectrum of financial conditions that a municipality may experience, [while] fiscal stress is a position on that spectrum.” In the second part of the book (Chapters 9–13), Maher, Park, McDonald III, and Deller apply their open-systems model to the analysis of municipal fiscal health and provide several in-depth case studies of U.S. municipalities, including Flint, MI, Wichita, KS, North Lauderdale, FL, Havelock, NC, and Commerce, CA. Although all these cities are small or mid-sized, they constitute a diverse subset of U.S. municipalities that face quite different socio-economic challenges, are subject to divergent fiscal trends, and heterogeneously respond to fiscal stress using a wide range of policy measures. For instance, three of these cities (Flint, Havelock, and Commerce) have experienced declining population and various short- or long-term fiscal problems. In each case study, apart from analyzing relevant indicators from audited financial reports, the authors summarize their interviews with local government officials responsible for managing municipal finances. These interviews give the readers a first-hand perspective on how effectively local finance team members interact with elected officials, how they assess the effects of recent economic shocks (particularly, the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic), what they think of institutional constraints imposed by their state, and how they self-assess fiscal health and financial condition of their locality. In one of the appendices, the authors provide a useful and illustrative critique of the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, which is frequently used by empirical public finance scholars. They argue that the survey, in comparison with annual comprehensive financial reports, “may not correspond to actual accounting information … and may not be a reliable source if researchers are seeking to identify a specific budget figure … and probe its policy implications.” This discussion will be of particular interest to any scholars who intend to work with large datasets of state and local governments in the United States. Both academics and practitioners will benefit from reading this important new book on local public finance. Academic scholars will gain insights from a comprehensive overview of the literature on local financial condition and the discussion of various data sources and their relevance in addressing different research questions in the field of public administration and policy. Public finance practitioners will be able to enhance their toolkit for assessing municipal fiscal health, learn about recent fiscal trends and policy actions at the local level, and compare their financial condition with some of their peers and competitors. Andrey Yushkov is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Tax Foundation and a faculty affiliate at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University. His primary areas of expertise include state and local public finance, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and municipal bond markets. Andrey holds a Ph.D. in public finance from Indiana University, an M.S. in economics from the University of Bonn, and a B.S. in public administration from St. Petersburg University. He worked as a consultant at Leontief Centre and participated in several World Bank projects dealing with the issues of public financial management and project evaluation in the public sector.