Baltic Local Governments' Fiscal Situation: Two Decades Of Reforms

The Baltic countries' sub-national governments have undergone a process of considerable democratization and decentralization during the last two decades. New functional and democratic local governments with a broad array of tasks have been created. The current problems of the Baltic local governments are related to their weak fiscal ability to fulfill their duties adequately. Another problem is related to widening revenue disparities among municipalities. The first part of this article comparatively analyses the composition of Baltic municipalities by population, their fiscal decentralization indicators and revenue-expenditure structure. In the second part of the article Baltic local government prospective reform issues are considered.