ABSTRACT
A conventional way of measuring the fiscal stress of a given jurisdiction is to gauge the amount of taxes collected relative to its fiscal capacity. Developed by American economists such as Selman Mushkin and Alice Rivlin in association with the US Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR), the Representative Tax System (RTS) has been widely used for the purpose of measuring the fiscal capacities of various governmental jurisdictions, including two federal governments: Canada and the United States. Measures of fiscal capacity need to account for these new developments in remote sales taxes. Fiscal comfort indices combined the two measures, fiscal capacity and fiscal need indices, into one measure. The RTS has been used as a tool to measure fiscal capacities of various governmental jurisdictions. The tax effort index does not account for different levels of demand for public programs across jurisdictions. The Representative Expenditures System (RES) measures jurisdictions representative workload.
