22/04/2025 Informed decision-making, sound public policy, effective service delivery, and efficient resource management all depend on access to high-quality, reliable data. Yet across South-East Europe (SEE), such data on local government finance is often scarce, fragmented, or difficult to access.
To address this critical gap, the NALAS Fiscal Decentralization Task Force, in cooperation with the KDZ Centre for Public Administration Research, continues its longstanding commitment to provide timely, accurate, relevant, and comparable data on local government finance across the region. The Fourth Edition of the NALAS Statistical Brief offers valuable insights for local government associations, policymakers at both local and central levels, practitioners, and researchers.
The Statistical Brief provides an overview of the size and structure of local governments in SEE, as well as a comparative analysis of national and local government finances in 2023, offering data in multiple formats to enable greater accessibility and analytical use.
The data shows that SEE presents a very diverse territorial structure in terms of number, tier and sizes of local governments. Similarly, there are major differences in the size of the public sector compared to the EU and within SEE economies, which greatly influence the fiscal autonomy of SEE local authorities. On average, in SEE, own source revenues constitute up to 30% of total local revenues varying from 7% in Moldova to 60% in Montenegro. Shared tax revenues and general grants make up to 39% of total local revenues and earmarked grants constitute the remaining 31%, making local governments significantly dependent on intergovernmental transfers and their underlying rules.
A more detailed analysis of fiscal decentralization reforms and indicators in SEE is provided in the forthcoming 10th Edition of the NALAS Fiscal Decentralization Report titled “Fiscal Decentralization in South-East Europe: A Decade of Reforms, Crises, and Multilevel Governance”, whish is going to be published in the upcoming weeks.
All data featured in the Statistical Brief are available for download through the NALAS Decentralisation Observatory for South-East Europe: www.nalas-observatory.eu. The Observatory serves as a key platform for accessing and utilizing credible and comparable data on local government finance in the region.
This publication has been made possible with the support of the Austrian Development Cooperation, through the Building Administrative Capacities of the Western Balkans and the Republic of Moldova – BACID III Project, and the Swiss Development Cooperation.
For more information, please contact us at:
📧 info@nalas.eu
📧 stafa@nalas.eu
