Introduction: symposium on local government finance

<p>Local government finance has suddenly become the most acute fiscal problem of the early 1980's in Britain. In January 1982 the Institute for Fiscal Studies held a conference, to discuss the issues involved. The immediate occation was the publication by the Government of a Green Paper describing alternative sources of local revenue (Alternatives to Domestic Rates, Cmnd 8449, 1981), but the discussion extended to the problems of local government finance more generally.</p>