미국 대도시의 재정위기와 지방정부의 대책

The Fiscal Crisis of the Major Cities in U.S.A. and It’s Policy Measures: Centering on the Case of the City of New York

The purpose of this essay is to review the fiscal crisis the City of New York suffered in 1975 and how the city managed to solve the problem. To deal with this crisis, the New York City sought to resort to the rescue measures of the Federal Government and eventually managed to escape the financial bankruptcy of the city. The financial status of the city was practically reconstructed by the powerful policy of financial renovation initiated by the Federal Government. We may find the fundamental reason of such a fiscal crisis in the typical financial problems any old metropolitan city usually goes through in the development process of capitalism. That is to say that as an old metropolitan city with monopolized capital accumulation becomes no longer appropriate for a production base of capitalists, the city stops to grow any further at a certain stage of its development. Thus, the employment ratio decreases; its population either stagnates or decreases; and accordingly tax collection decreases as the income of an individual citizen decreases. However, when we consider the cases of most other old metropolitan cities which did not have such a crisis, we could assume that the fiscal crisis of the City of New York has been caused mainly by the mismanagement of the City Government. In other words, the City of New York itself had caused its fiscal crisis by accumulating a huge sum of financial deficit and short-term liabilities in spite of the greatest amount of financial support ever offered by the State Government and Federal Government. Eventually, the State Government imposed a full-scale financial reform upon the City of New York. By the year of 1978, the city managed to reconstruct its financial status through a three-year financial rehabilitation plan which included freezing the wages of city government employees and other various measures.