ABSTRACT
KEN DAVEY & GA´BOR PE´TERI *Chairman of the Local Government Initiative Steering Commitee and Professor Emeritus in
the School of Public Policy, University of Birmingham, UK
**LGI Development, London, UK
Introduction
The local government reforms of the early 1990s were designed to complete the democratic revolution. Public administration was to be accountable at both national and local levels. The first step, taken in most Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries was to establish democratically elected mayors and councils at the basic municipal level of villages, towns and cities. In financial terms this was taken to mean local budgets managed by
locally elected representatives and funded both securely and normatively,
free from reliance on begging and bargaining with higher political levels – by right not favour. How far these political objectives were achieved in terms of fiscal
decentralisation is the subject of this article, illustrated by the experience of three CEE countries, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. (Czech Republic and Slovakia were, of course, constituents of a single nation until 1993, but local government systems were already administered separately in 1990.)
Functions and Structures
The major variation between the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia in the initial round of reforms in the early 1990s was the extent to which they covered all aspects of a democratic system of decentralisation, such as the establishment of higher tiers of self-government, the devolution of competences, the organisation and management of supervisory and audit functions, the transfer of property and the allocation of a permanent revenue base.
