Normative Approach of Assessment of Municipal Finance: A Case Study of West Bengal

The macro overview of municipal finance may not hold enough for understanding the sources, structure, composition, and trend of aggregate revenue and expenditure of the urban local authorities in cities and may not focus enough lights on the constraint faced by the individual local government and the requirement for suitable policy initiative to solve them. Therefore, the present study evaluates the fiscal parameter of individual municipal bodies to examine their ability to provide the minimum level of civic amenities, and a normative approach of assessment of municipal finance applied for this purpose. The study revealed that the Municipal corporations who enjoyed a greater degree of delegation of revenue power and have lesser dependence on upper tiers of government; perform well in terms of provision of the minimum level of civic services or lower under- spending.