Agent-based modeling of vertical competition of governments in multi-level country: setting a task
Annotation
The article suggests a task of agent-based modeling of inter-governmental vertical competition in multi-level state, for example the federal (central) government with sub-national governments. It is introduced types of agents of this model: agent-center refers to the central level, a few agents-regions refer to the subnational level. On the bottom there are agents-individuals that refer to population and they are also a level of govern-ance. All agents exchange between them with taxes and budget services, where there are three classes of goods: pure public goods, local public goods and private goods. Agents-individuals are interested in quality of goods, that they feel as individual utility. Agents-individuals can receive these goods from the agent-Center, from agens-regions, and theycan also provide these services themselves. In the last case they have individual costs of producing the goods. The agent-center and agents-regions are interested in taxes that partly cover costs of public goods producing and in some part they provide utility for governmental bodies. It is suggested two schemes of delegation: the first is “bottom-up”, where agents-individuals provide themselves all goods in the beginning; the second one is “up-to down”, where all goods are provided by the agent-center in the beginning. First scheme says of centralization process, the second one says of decentralization. In the research focus of these models there are questions: how functions on providing local public goods and private goods are arranging on the horizontal and vertical of a state, on the main classes of goods according the budget classification of expenditures; what is difference of this arrangement between two models: “bottom-up” and “up-to down”, and what is difference in economic terms? How number of government levels depends on preferences of local population and economic factors.