Fiscal Capacity of States, Fiscal 2002

States and their local governments vary both in their needs to provide basic public services, and in their abilities to raise revenues to pay for those services. A forthcoming joint study by the Tax Policy Center and the New England Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, uses the Representative Revenue System (RRS) and the Representative Expenditure System (RES) frameworks to quantify these disparities across states by comparing each states revenue capacity, revenue effort, and necessary expenditures to the average capacity, effort, and need in states across the country.