Financial Resources Mobilization Performance of Rural Local Government: Case Study of Three Union Parishad in Bangladesh

Abstract

Union Parishads (councils) being the century old rural local government in Bangladesh are yet to fulfill the expectations of rural citizen which is mainly due to own resources constraints including miserable local resources mobilization. This paper focuses on Union Parishads recent revenue trend and performance from five years secondary data (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007) and primary data collected from Parishad representatives, local people, government officials and national experts. Finding of the study shows that despite revenue potentials, weak revenue administration, inadequate adjustments and assignments of local revenue sources including lack of union functionaries training become impediments on local revenue enhancement. Other finding of the study suggests that in the absence of valuation based tax assessment system, households housing pattern and literacy rate can be significant determinants in ascertaining annual average holding tax revenue while per capita household holding tax, remittances, agricultural land ownership, households having electricity connections can be used as significant variables to determine the taxpayers ability to pay holding tax.

Exploring the Performance of and the Citizens’ Trust in Local Government Institutions (LGIs) at the Grassroots: Views from Bangladesh

“…Local government has been in existence for long in the Indian sub-continent but LGIs received organisational form during the British rule in India. There have been autonomous and self-sufficient institutions generally known as ‘village republics’ at the grassroots in the Indian sub-continent where the ordinary people had access to the decision-making process (Ferdaus & Hossain, 2020; Ullah & Pongquan, 2010). The concept of village republic was later changed to village panchayats in India and eventually to UPs in Bangladesh (Ferdaus & Hossain, 2020; Jodhka, 2002).…”

“…In terms of social development, implementing social protection programmes, ensuring effective operation of Union Health Centres, supervising the operation of local primary schools, preventing early marriages and running social campaigns in collaboration with other government as well as non-government agencies are important functions of the UPs. Besides, forming and making UP standing committees functional, preparing comprehensive Union Plan by prioritising development projects, conducting open budget sessions at the UPs and conducting ward meetings-are some of the mandatory tasks of the UP (Ahmed, 2016;Ferdaus & Hossain, 2020;Panday & Rabbani, 2011;Ullah & Pongquan, 2010).…”

Resource Mobilization Pattern of Union Parishad : A Study on Khulna District, Southwest Bangladesh

“…Miserable local resource mobilization is supposed to be the major barrier of UPs on the way of mitigating the needs of rural citizen. But recent thinking of development proponents highly recognized national development as a local responsibility, hence generation of local revenue source is essential for the better performance of the local government bodies (Ullah and Pongquan, 2010). So, the role of Ups is praise worthy for rural development.…”

“…The reasons behind such declines are weaker institutional capacity, reluctance of centre to increase local transfers (DANIDA, 2000), loopholes in taxation policy like inefficient assessment, poor enforcement and tendency in tax evasion (USAID, 1998). All these barriers stressed on the need to identify feasible local revenue source which depends on local fiscal effort along with fiscal and nonfiscal support from centre (Ullah and Pongquan, 2010). But this capacity is highly restricted with the limited size (in terms of human settlement and productive land area) and lack of autonomy of local government in the developing world (Hye, 1985).…”