Check out some of the new research featured in the International Center for Public Policy’s (ICePP) working paper series.
Recently, Simanti Bandyopadhyay, Subrata Majumder, and Aishna Sharma 
contributed a paper called “Fiscal Sustainability of Small and Medium Cities in India: Some New Dimensions.” The authors assessed the performances of 910 city governments in southern India, focusing on three strands of government performance embedded in the public finance cycle: how effectively expenditures get translated to services, services lead to revenues, and revenues result in effective expenditures.
Their main findings suggest that irrespective of size, services have not generated sufficient revenues, primarily due to poor collection efficiency, and cities could have incurred the same levels of expenditures with less revenue, indicating suboptimal resource utilization. Furthermore, smaller cities suffer from unrecoverable supply bottlenecks—the maximum in roads followed by water—and finally, misutilization of establishment expenditures is prevalent.
ICePP has published a working paper series and occasional papers since 1997 on public policy topics in developed and developing countries, with the primary objective to disseminate academic research and findings quickly and stimulate discussion to expand knowledge, instill optimal practice, and build capacity in the public sector around the world to improve human well-being. All views expressed in this working paper series are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, or Georgia State University. All papers should be cited properly with reference to the author, institution and working paper series.