Vertical Imbalance and Fiscal Federalism in Italy: a possible design for local taxes.

The attempt to promote fiscal federalism in Italy seem to be stopped by economic crisis. The Legge Delega 42/2009 was never fully applied, municipalities had lost the power of setting local tax rates and the main local tax on housing was reformed to not apply IMU on the main house. This paper suggests that the main problem to solve for designing a local tax system in Italy is the vertical imbalance one. Therefore resources for providing a list of main functions of Municipality have to be granted by central governement. Such provision should be accountable and only after the definition of such resources municipal fiscal autonomy could be set. Four scenarios are propose in order to design an accountable local fiscal system where central and local responsability are clear.