ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several purposes: fiscal disparity is the difference in fiscal capacity that exists between any two or more local governments in a metropolitan area. It explores the terms of regional public economy, local public economy, and metropolitan public economy are used interchangeably. Charles Tiebouts formal elucidation of the metropolitan public economy caught regionalists attention in 1956 because of the clarity with which he introduced market competition into the metropolitan public economy, because it proposed that self-interest was the force behind public goods distribution, and because it deemphasized centralized metropolitan polity. The chapter examines that one has observed fiscal disparity is present in polycentric metropolitan areas. The chapter explores one recent effort to use the Representative Revenue System (RRS) to test fiscal disparity as related to numerosity in six metropolitan areas: Baltimore, Las Vegas, Miami, Milwaukee, Richmond, and San Francisco.
