公共行政与管理评论

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Fiscal Federalism and Challenges of Development in Nigeria: A Search for Remediation

Nkwede Joseph Okwesili, Tiben Benz Nwali and Josephine Orga

Fiscal federalism concerns the sharing of resources among federating units to enable them fulfill their constitutional obligations. This paper attempted to capture the underlying imperatives of fiscal federalism for national development. It opened with the conceptual explication of the concepts of federalism, fiscal federalism and development from where it was noticed that the principle of fiscal autonomy and fiscal integrity are paramount aspects of the survival and continued existence of truly federating system of government. In trying to achieve the purpose of the study, the paper anchored on Buchan Fiscal Residuum Theory having a leeway to determining the balance between the contributions made and the value of the public services returned to individual. The paper revealed that the contending issues and challenges of fiscal federalism could be in form of mismatch between revenue sources and the functions of the various tiers of government. The paper concluded and recommended that there is need to ensure that the distribution of revenue should encourage each state and local governments to improve internal revenue generation, not to constantly and wholly depend on fund coming from the federation account and the issues of intergovernmental relations should be reviewed and respected so that functions to be performed by each tier of government could be explicitly stated.