One method of studying the effects of business cycles on city finances is to view it from afar,either as a purely theoretical exercise or by observing what has occurred and drawing implications from the empirical results. A second alternative is to ask local business and political leaders their impressions of how business conditions affect their city .A third approach and the one followed here is to observe what the cities themselves show in published material to be their best estimates of the relationship between the national economy and the local economy and local fisc.

Although few cities have directly addressed the question of the impact of the national economy on their locality, an increasing number of cities are producing multi-year forecasts of their revenues and expenditures under a variety of macroeconomic scenarios.Since the products of these forecasts are then used for longer range budgetary planning, it is presumed that these jurisdictions place credence in the implied linkages between the national economy and their own situations. The objective of this paper is,therefore,to review the public forecasts made in a set of cities to is to ascertain how local fiscal managers expect their local situation to respond to a changing national economic environment.

This report is part of the collection of scanned historical documents available to the public.