Distribution of Federal Equalization Grants: Assessing the Impact of Major Changes

The purpose of the work is to establish how the main changes in the methodology of distribution of grants from the federal budget for fiscal capacity equalization affected the budget revenues of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the way of distribution of non-earmarked interbudget transfers affects the effectiveness of the model of interbudget relations. The modeling of the values of the transfers allocated annually to each constituent entity of the Russian Federation has been performed, demonstrating the adequacy of the developed methodology. The consequences of all major changes in the methodology of allocation of subsidies, such as introduction of restrictions on the reduction and increase of transfers, launching the mechanism of the model budget, reducing the equalization criterion and adding the coefficient of the level of social burden to the index of budget expenditures, have been calculated. It was found that the changes in the distribution methodology were progressive, that is, the higher was the fiscal capacity before the distribution, the smaller was the annual increase in equalization grants as a result of the changes. In other words, over time, more and more funds were allocated to the least prosperous regions. The regions of the North Caucasus Federal District benefited the most from the changes, and in general, all the innovations, except for restrictions on the reduction and increase in subsidies, had approximately the same spatial effect in terms of the composition of the “winning” regions. At the same time, it is more difficult to draw conclusions about the “losing” regions, since they have different levels of fiscal capacity.