Measuring Financial Health of Local Governments: A Comparative Framework

This chapter seeks to build a theoretical framework which may help scholars and practitioners struggling to address the ongoing fiscal stress facing local governments to identify and explore the different strategies that have been used to measure financial health across countries. Using some national and regional cases of OECD countries (Korea, Italy, Michigan, New South Wales) this framework seeks to measure which fiscal health measures are used in common and whether those measurements have the same meaning. A discussion of these issues aiming at identifying the strength and weaknesses in terms of capacity of measuring financial health of different accounting system contexts is provided.