The efficiency of public services in small municipalities: The case of drinking water supply

This paper uses DEA methodology to analyze the efficiency of the drinking water provision service in small municipalities. Once the efficiency indicators are obtained, these are related to a group of exogenous variables, so as to evaluate the determinants of efficiency. We use a sample of Spanish municipalities of under 5000 inhabitants in 2014, and the results show a negative and significant impact of population density and citizens' level of income on the drinking water supply efficiency. Moreover, the greater the political strength of the local government, the higher the level of efficiency in the provision of drinking water. The findings also show that there is greater efficiency when the provision of drinking water is managed directly by the local government. Finally, there is no significant impact of the touristic character of the municipality or of the government's political ideology on the efficiency of the drinking water supply.     

Financing roads and railways with decentralized real estate taxes: the case of Sweden

Roads and railways in Sweden are mainly financed with national government taxes. However, the regional distribution of benefits differs widely from that of tax payments. As a consequence, overspending is likely to occur. A condition for efficiency is that the collective of users should pay for such projects. Therefore, we propose a new regional order for financing projects: government expenditures for transportation projects should be transferred to regions as well as the real estate tax to finance them. We present estimates of the size of such expenditures and of the income from real estate taxes following decentralization to regions.     

Jane Jacobs on the Organization of Municipal Government

Although Jane Jacobs acknowledges the existence of metropolitan areas; her main unit of analysis for local politics is the center‐city municipality. She is interested in how it can be decentralized, both to districts and to neighborhoods. Because she is suspicious of large organizations, she is not an advocate of expanding the size of center‐city municipalities or of creating elaborate schemes for metropolitan government. Because she believes that city‐regions should be more politically autonomous does not mean that she believes that each should have only one municipal government. Jacobs never confuses the municipality as an institution of local government with the city‐region as an incubator of economic activity. She never suggests that the economic fate of cities is determined by municipalities, however they might be organized. By keeping the importance of municipal government in perspective, her work helps us resist arguments that central‐city municipalities must be enlarged in size so as to enable their respective cities to compete globally.     

Demography and evolution of regional inequality

This paper addresses the importance of life cycle aspects in explaining the evolution of regional income inequality. The analysis of household microdata organized in age cohorts shows that Brazilian regional income inequality has different dynamics across generations, with income convergence being observed only for the older generations. The larger income share of younger generations produces a low speed of convergence in the country. When retirement payments, pensions, and other government transfers are excluded from income, convergence is not observed even for the older generations.     

Using strategic management practices to promote participatory democracy in Australian local government

Strategic management was introduced as a critical component of Australian local government reform during the 1990s. In addition to encouraging efficiency and effectiveness of operation, it was also intended to promote participatory democracy within local authorities. The paper explores the extent to which this objective has been achieved through an analysis of twenty-five New South Wales municipalities. Discussion concludes that while strategic management has enhanced community involvement in local governance, it cannot be a substitute for traditional democratic processes.     

Path dependencies and defensive routines in Finnish city-regional land-use policy cooperation: case Ristikytö

The article seeks to explain the factors preventing the emergence of a broader city-regional view in land-use policy, in a Finnish urban region fragmented institutionally by several municipalities that have high independence in determining their own land-use policies. The ongoing municipal reform by the Finnish government acknowledges the importance of urban regions in global competitiveness and economic livelihood, and thus it encourages municipalities in urban regions to merge, in order to avoid their counterproductive mutual competition over investments and residents, and related municipal tax income. However, such pressure by the central government has often resulted in evasive manoeuvres and superficial city-regional rhetoric at the level of local governments, with a hidden motivation of maintaining the status quo of inter-municipal competition. As a theoretical framework to explain this phenomenon, the theoretical insights on path dependence and defensive routines are combined. Regarding empirical material, the article focuses on the case of Ristikytö in the intersection between three municipalities in Central Uusimaa, 35?km north of Helsinki.     

Using strategic management practices to promote participatory democracy in Australian local government

Abstract

Strategic management was introduced as a critical component of Australian local government reform during the 1990s. In addition to encouraging efficiency and effectiveness of operation, it was also intended to promote participatory democracy within local authorities. The paper explores the extent to which this objective has been achieved through an analysis of twenty‐five New South Wales municipalities. Discussion concludes that while strategic management has enhanced community involvement in local governance, it cannot be a substitute for traditional democratic processes.     

1990年代我国省区间城市化进程的差异研究--基于第五次人口普查口径的分析

1990年以来,我国进入了城市化的快速发展时期,本文主要对我国20世纪90年代各省区的城市化进程进行比较分析。鉴于1990年和 2002年我国各城镇人口统计的口径不一,按照双轨城市化的概念,本文先对我国1990年代各地区的城市化水平进行调整,然后与各地区历年的经济发展水平(以人均GDP来表示)进行相关分析,得到1990年代我国各省区城市化进程的五种演变类型。结果表明:由于经济发展水平和速度的差异,我国省区间城市化进程差异较大,区域城市化不平衡现象依然显著;东部沿海部分发达省区城市化程度较高、速度较快;东北和西部省区城市化水平发展相对较慢、城市化水平也是最低; 而京津沪三个直辖市已经进入城市化的稳定增长阶段,未来提升的速度和幅度都不高。     

Brazilian policies on climate change: The missing link to cities

This paper criticizes the progress of the Brazilian government in preventing greenhouse gas emissions originating in urban areas. In 2009, Brazil approved its “National Policy on Climate Change”, complementing the 2008s National Plan on Climate Change (NPCC). In these documents, the federal government established measures to be undertaken in order to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, focusing on deforestation.However, the federal government should have regulated urban emissions, since the present Brazilian urbanization context, with big metropolises and the gradual migration of the population to the suburbs, represents a burden on climate change. With this new reality, transport and electricity use tend to grow, with the consequent increase in emissions.On the other hand, the municipalities are responsible for most city planning and transportation policies in Brazil. Pressed by their daily needs, they show little concern towards climate change and do not include the regulation of major sources of emissions among their priorities. Consequently, the municipalities are inefficient in preventing climate change. There are two main explanations for that: they do not have the know-how to prevent emissions; and they do not share this political agenda, since the impact of climate change is seldom acknowledged in the city where the emissions occur. Therefore, the central government has a role to play in regulating urban emissions. The study concludes that the National Plan and the National Policy, being federal documents, should have addressed urban emissions throughout the nation. Ultimately, they should be revised to guide city planners into planning greener cities. In order to succeed in this task, this legislation should not only require the reduction of emissions, but it should also indicate to the municipalities how they might achieve the reduction.     

Decentralization and efficiency of local government

This study analyzes the links between efficiency and the decentralization of power in Spanish local governments for the years 1995 and 2000. To this end, we carried out a two-stage activity analysis in which the performance of each municipality was first evaluated against other municipalities with a similar level of power and, in a second stage, compared with that of other municipalities for which decentralization remained at a more preliminary stage. Results suggest that some municipalities could manage their resources more efficiently if they were granted more power. Although these sort of decentralized economies do not emerge for all municipalities, their magnitude clearly overshadows the diseconomies found if downscaling of decision making goes too far and least decentralized municipalities dominate. In addition, the likely efficiency gains from enhanced decentralization increase over time.     

State-led metropolisation in Russia

Russian urban planning and government are undergoing a metropolitan turn. The Russian central government is seeking to spatially rebalance the Russian economy by creating new economic centres and introducing metropolitan-level urban planning and government for selected core cities and adjacent municipalities. From the urban planning perspective, metropolisation aims to promote better coordination within functional urban areas. Using the current debates in urban planning and economic geography, this paper examines the origins, content, and economic implications of this state-led metropolisation. It concludes that although some material conditions for metropolisation are present, cities may not be able to fulfil the vision of new ‘economic engines’ because of deeply embedded structural problems in the Russian economy and the current weakness of metropolitan governments.     

The trade-off between cost efficiency and public service quality: A non-parametric frontier analysis of Italian major municipalities

This paper presents the results of an empirical study aimed at evaluating the cost efficiency of 108 Italian major municipalities, and investigating to what extent the municipality efficiency is also associated to the effectiveness of public expenditure, and consequently to quality of services offered to citizens. The study implements Data Envelopment Analysis to calculate the efficiency score and understand if it is influenced by scale economies and determine the type of these economies. For this purpose, every municipality was modeled as a production function using 6 cost item inputs and 2 outputs. Finally, the study implemented a truncated regression equation using the bootstrapped efficiency estimate as the dependent variable, and a selection of indicators measuring the quality of public services offered in the context as the independent variables.Results reveal that there exist important scale inefficiencies in a number of municipalities, but unexpectedly a great amount of inefficiencies are caused by decreasing returns to scale. Additionally, the study suggests that a trade-off between expenditure efficiency and effectiveness, i.e. the quality of public service, seems to exist.     

The provision of urban parks: an empirical test of spatial spillovers in an urban area using geographic information systems

Green spaces provide various amenities ranging from ecological services to recreational benefits. They are strategic for municipalities both for households and business attractiveness. While the social demand for urban parks is increasing, information about their provision and guidance regarding the efficiency of local policies remain scarce. In this paper, we investigate the existence and the nature of spatial spillovers for the provision of urban parks in 93 municipalities in the urban area of Angers, France. We use geographic information systems to obtain land use data. We estimate a reaction function, with interactions between cities and their provision of urban parks. For this end, we shall apply spatial econometric techniques. We find positive autocorrelation among municipalities. A 10% rise in the level of parks in neighboring municipalities leads to a 3.6% increase ceteris paribus. From the empirical perspective, we cannot reject the hypothesis of mimetic behaviour among municipalities.     

METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE: HOW REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS INFLUENCE INTERLOCAL LAND USE COORDINATION

By focusing on Regional Planning Councils and metropolitan municipalities in Florida, this study addresses a gap in the literature concerning the role of regional organizations in metropolitan governance research. This study investigates two competing visions of the influence of regional organizations on interlocal coordination in land use decision making. The results show that regional organizations’ substitutive effects on self‐organizing interlocal cooperation are salient, while their complementary influence is not observed in regard to land use. Moreover, this research posits that municipalities with a higher level of need for coordination due to population stress and a council–manager form of government are more likely to coordinate land use decisions with other local governments.     

Do Economies of Scale Exist in Australian Local Government? A Review of the Research Evidence1

The 1990s witnessed a major era of structural reform in Australian local government. Amalgamation programmes in all six states resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of local authorities in Australia. The chief rationale underlying local government mergers lay apparently in the belief that larger municipalities would exhibit greater economic efficiencies. Despite its widespread acceptance amongst policy elites, this argument did not derive from a solid empirical base. This article seeks to evaluate available research evidence on the controversial question of economies of scale in Australian local government.     

The current urbanization policy evaluated

The Dutch national government is pursuing an urbanization policy by which most development is to be concentrated in and around a limited number of towns and cities. This policy can be seen as a continuation of the previous policies of the national government, but in a more extreme form. Furthermore that government is trying to get it realized in new ways, with the municipalities in a city region working together more closely and assuming more of the financial responsibility. It is too soon to say whether the new policy will succeed, but some of the necessary conditions are not being met. In particular, the reorganization of local government is meeting great difficulties, and the land and housing markets are changing in unforeseen ways. Tim Zwanikkenis researcher at the University of Nijmegen, School of Environmental Studies. Barrie Needham is Professor of Spatial Planning at the University of Nijmegen, School of Environmental Studies.     

Twenty-Five Years of Urban Policy and Research, 1982–2006

The 1990s witnessed a major era of structural reform in Australian local government. Amalgamation programmes in all six states resulted in a substantial decrease in the number of local authorities in Australia. The chief rationale underlying local government mergers lay apparently in the belief that larger municipalities would exhibit greater economic efficiencies. Despite its widespread acceptance amongst policy elites, this argument did not derive from a solid empirical base. This article seeks to evaluate available research evidence on the controversial question of economies of scale in Australian local government.     

Institutional Performance And Social Capital: An Application To The Local Government Level

Abstract: A large and growing body of research is devoted to the effects of social capital on institutional performance. This literature reveals that societies characterized by higher levels of social capital tend to achieve superior performance. Still, enquiries to date predominantly concentrate on country‐level data or large sub‐national units. The primary purpose of this article is to extend the empirical work to the local government level, while retaining the use of objective data to gauge institutional performance. This use of local data has the advantage of increasing the data set available and provides a more stringent test of the effect of social capital because social capital is likely to vary less at lower levels of government. The results—based on an empirical analysis of 305 Flemish municipalities in 2000—support the view that social capital leads to government (out)performance also at the local level of government.     

考虑风险偏好的综合管廊 PPP 项目多主体合作演化研究

为解决综合管廊 PPP 项目中各主体由于信息不对称造成的效率低下问题, 考虑风险偏好因素, 构建政府、社会资本及管线单位的三方演化博弈模型,并借助系统动力学方法分析各主体在不同情形下的演化规律。结果表明, 风险偏好可以改变系统的收敛速率与方向, 各方对激励与惩罚的敏感性有所不同, 适当的补贴和罚款能够有效起到激励和监督作用, 政府应建立合理的协调机制来规范各主体行为,促使多方达成合作意愿,实现“多赢” 的局面。     

Drafting of the 1968 Japanese City Planning Law

The Japanese City Planning Law, enacted in 1968, revised the 1919 City Planning Law. It has been described as comprehensive but containing defects, such as imperfect delegation of planning powers to the municipalities. Authoritative works on the history of modern Japanese urban planning by Ishida and Sorensen also emphasize the historical background of the 1968 Law, namely, a general agreement on the need to control urban development based on land-use planning and the progressive historical context. The relationship between this background and the formulation of the 1968 Law is yet to be examined. Analyses of public records, the Diet debates and newspapers demonstrate the following: first, delegation of planning powers to the municipalities, although imperfect, could have been further limited; and second, the ruling party's fear of losing the electorate's support in urban areas and the media pressure on the government made a perfunctory bill inevitable.