In France under the Ancien Régime, an estate provincial (État provincial) was an assembly of the three estates of a province, "regularly constituted, periodically convoked and possessing certain political and administrative functions, of which the main one was to vote on the impôt"[1]. Examples include the Estates of Brittany, Estates of Burgundy and Estates of Languedoc.
In France their official name was 'estates general of [province]' (to distinguish them from the 'états particuliers' and States-General) or simply 'the estates'. Without reducing it simply to this question, impôts were the provincial estates' preoccupation and main raison d'être throughout the ancien régime - their formal assent was generally accompanied by the drafting of complaints to send to the king or his councils. A province qualified to have an estates provincial was known as a pays d'états, whereas an area where impôts were fixed by the king's representatives (known as the élus) were known as pays d'élection.