Institutional Reforms, Federal Transfers, and Subnational Taxation

Although Argentina does not rank badly in democratic indexes, actual levels of institutional quality in subnational units do not always scale down evenly. Some Argentinian provinces and municipalities are truly obscure places in terms of law enforcement, bureaucratic effectiveness and state accountability. This thesis explores channels leading to these pervasive institutional characteristics. I argue that some of these particularities can be rooted in subnational socio-economic and fiscal conditions. In the first two chapters I broadly analyse unintended consequences from the Federal Tax-sharing Agreement (FTSA) in Argentina. The FTSA, or "Coparticipation", is the building block of subnational finances, both for provinces and for municipalities. I posit that the current system generates a number of effects, ranging from allowing mayors to rely on opaque tax structures, to facilitating constitutional reforms to relax term limits in some provinces. In the last chapter, this appetite for constitutional tailoring is further explored for Municipal Charters (MC), connecting it to local levels of socio-economic segregation and spatial inequality.