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Never waste a good crisis! This has become the mantra of politicians and civic leaders facing fallout of the recent financial crisis. It declares that crisis can prove fertile ground for positive change, opportunity can spring from ruin, and that infrastructure, processes and institutions can be rebuilt. Financial downturns affect municipalities and regional economies especially acutely. This paper investigates the responses of metropolitan regions to crisis and its effect on collective action to the "opportunities" of crisis. To what degree does a common challenge provoke or strengthen collective action and cooperation between governments in metropolitan regions? To what extent, and under what conditions, does it exacerbate tensions and increase fragmentation? To answer these questions this paper explores the experiences of three city regions - Toronto, Canada; Frankfurt, Germany; and Detroit, USA - in previous recessions as well as the current downturn. These cases exhibit different patterns of regional and local responses and an analysis of these experiences will inform a hypothesis about the effects of crisis on cooperation and metropolitan governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deciding how to finance multiple levels of government is a challenging task for all political systems. Federal states, in addition, have a constitutional contract to divide financial accountability across national and subnational governments. In comparison with unitary states, federal states are arguably more committed to fiscal decentralization precisely because of this constitutional contract. Nevertheless, a wide variation in the extent of fiscal centralization is observed even among developed federal states. This paper explores the political economy of fiscal centralization in six developed federal states, Australia, Canada, Austria, Germany, the United States, and Belgium, from 1961 through 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]