Inter-municipal cooperation in public service delivery has attracted the interest of local authorities seeking to reform public service provision. Cost saving, together with better quality and ...coordination, has been among the most important drivers of such cooperation. However, the empirical results on inter-municipal cooperation and its associated costs offer divergent outcomes. By conducting a meta-regression analysis, we seek to explain this discrepancy. We formulate several hypotheses regarding scale economies, transaction costs, and governance of cooperation. While we find no clear indications of the role played by transaction costs in the relationship between cooperation and service delivery costs, we find strong evidence that population size and governance are significant in explaining the relationship. Specifically, small populations and delegation to a higher tier of government seem to offer cost advantages to cooperating municipalities. As an extension of our model, we seek to disentangle service-related transaction costs based on asset specificity and ease of measurability of the service.
Since the days of Montesquieu and Jefferson, political decentralization has been seen as a force for better government and economic performance. It is thought to bring government 'closer to the ...people', nurture civic virtue, protect liberty, exploit local information, stimulate policy innovation, and alleviate ethnic tensions. Inspired by such arguments, and generously funded by the major development agencies, countries across the globe have been racing to devolve power to local governments. This book re-examines the arguments that underlie the modern faith in decentralization. Using logical analysis and formal modeling, and appealing to numerous examples, it shows that most are based on vague intuitions or partial views that do not withstand scrutiny. A review of empirical studies of decentralization finds these as inconclusive and mutually contradictory as the theories they set out to test.
Municipal amalgamation reforms are a policy being put to use in most developed countries. The basic rationale for most of these reforms is taking advantage of economies of scale in the municipal ...provision of public services. However, contrary to conventional wisdom of public officials, the related empirical literature, which relies mostly on descriptive evidence, finds almost no benefits arising from an amalgamation. The purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence for the fiscal outcomes of municipal amalgamations based on the Difference-in-Differences methodology. The paper is using an extensive panel data of municipalities in Israel for the years 1999–2007 in order to analyze the Israeli amalgamation reform of 2003. The results indicate that the amalgamations resulted in a decrease of about 9% in municipal expenditures, and are robust to the possibility of selection bias. I find no evidence of a decrease in the level of services provided to the residents of the amalgamated municipalities. The results suggest that municipal amalgamations do bring economies of scale into practice.
The scope of this paper is to analyze the adhesion of municipalities in Sao Paulo to the Family Health Strategy (FHS). The adhesion data in SP showed that it did not occur unanimously, immediately or ...uniformly. The theory of policy diffusion was used, with the objective of studying the process of adoption and implementation of public policies by subnational entities, in contexts where coercion occurs in the federal sphere. From the discussions related to the diffusion mechanism called coercion, the following question was answered: what explains the diffusion of the FHS in the municipalities of SP, in the coercive context of vertical influence? The survival analysis technique was applied to identify explanatory factors for the diffusion of the FHS, considering political and party variables of institutional design, neighborhood influence, internal needs, and structural factors. The results reveal that horizontal interactions between both ideological and regional subnational governments, as well as the local social, economic and political issues are relevant to understand the research questions. This finding enables us to reflect on the limits of vertical influence in the promotion of initiatives for subnational governments.
Durante las últimas décadas, las instituciones europeas han emitido múltiples recomendaciones para la protección de las denominadas lenguas regionales. La mayor parte de los territorios españoles que ...cuentan con un idioma propio diferente del castellano han desarrollado sistemas educativos multilingües donde la lengua estatal, la regional y la(s) extranjera(s) se utilizan como idiomas vehiculares. Sin embargo, en el territorio de Aragón se ha apostado por la utilización del castellano y las lenguas extranjeras, dejando un pequeño espacio para el aragonés y el catalán de Aragón en algunos centros. De todas formas, en los últimos años, el gobierno regional ha creado la primera institución autonómica que está desarrollando acciones de política lingüística, entre las cuales destaca la ampliación de la enseñanza del aragonés a una buena parte de las escuelas de la provincia de Huesca. Esta investigación se centra en la exploración de la evolución de las actitudes lingüísticas del alumnado de Educación Primaria tras el primer curso de presencia de esta lengua en la escuela. Para ello, se desarrolló un estudio pretest-postest basado en la técnica de los pares ocultos, en tres escuelas rurales de localidades donde el aragonés está completamente sustituido por el castellano, pero cuenta con diferente grado de latencia. El estudio se centró en la evaluación de las actitudes hacia el aragonés, el francés y el inglés. Los principales resultados muestran el influjo positivo del estudio de la lengua propia y todavía latente en el territorio para la mejora de las actitudes hacia este idioma y también hacia las lenguas extranjeras. Palabras clave: Actitudes lingüísticas, educación lingüística, lengua minoritaria, sustitución lingüística, técnica de pares ocultos. During the last decades, European institutions have focused on suggesting several measures to prevent the disappearance of European regional languages. Most of bilingual Spanish territories have developed multilingual educational systems where the state, the regional and the foreign language are used as mediums of instruction. The territory of Aragon has mostly opted for the use of Spanish and foreign languages. However, in the last years, regional government has created the first regional institution that is developing different language policy actions. One of the most relevant has been the extension of the teaching of Aragonese language to a good part of the schools in Huesca province. This research is focused on exploring the evolution of language attitudes among Primary Education students after the first course of presence of Aragonese language in school. We developed a pretest-postest study based on matched guise technique in three rural schools located in villages where Aragonese is totally substituted by Spanish, but it still has diferent degree of latency. The study was focused on attitudes towards Aragonese, French and English. Main results show the positive influence of studying the regional language to improve attitudes towards it but also towards the foreign languages studied in school. Keywords: Language attitudes, language education, language shift, matched guise technique, minority language.
•It demonstrates the operational mechanism of land mortgage and land reserve centre, local government financial vehicle, and chengtou bonds as financial instruments.•It highlights the role of land in ...financing urban development in China.•It argues that the land financialisation is a strategy adopted to cope with the economic crisis.
There is a growing body of literature on China’s land reform, land system and land-centred urbanisation. While the contribution of land proceeds to Chinese local public finance and infrastructure investment has been widely acknowledged, few studies examine land through the perspective of financialisation, namely how land development uses financial instruments to generate development finance. The process of land-driven financialisation in China has not been well understood. This paper examines the land mortgage, which has accelerated since 2008, and subsequent waves of financialisation through local government financial vehicles (LGFVs) and Chengtou Bonds (urban construction and investment bonds). We highlight that the adoption of a fiscal stimulus package triggered land financialisation, which started as a development strategy for crisis management in China.
This paper examines how fiscal incentives affect the policy choices of local governments in the context of China. Based on exogenous changes in the intergovernmental revenue-sharing scheme, we ...construct a simulated instrumental variable to resolve the endogeneity problem. We find evidence that local governments shifted their efforts from fostering industrial growth to “urbanizing” China, i.e., to developing the real estate and construction sectors, when their retention rate of enterprise tax revenue was reduced. The increase from the new revenue source compensated for half of the losses in revenue that resulted from the reassignment of fiscal rights. The reassignment had also the effect of retarding the industrial growth of domestically-owned firms in particular.
•We examine how fiscal incentives affect local policy choices in China.•We exploit the exogenous decline in a prefecture's retained share of enterprise tax.•Local governments increasingly shifted their efforts to urbanization.•This shift was at the expense of industrial development.
Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public officials, but local citizens do not always ...associate them with the central government. Street-Level Governing is the first book to investigate how muhtars carry out their role-not only what they are supposed to do, but how they actually operate-to provide an ethnographic study of the state as viewed from its margins. It starts from the premise that the seeming "margin" of state administration is not peripheral at all, but instructive as to how it functions.As Elise Massicard shows, muhtars exist at the intersection of everyday life and the exercise of power. Their position offers a personalized point of contact between citizens and state institutions, enabling close oversight of the citizenry, yet simultaneously projecting the sense of an accessible state to individuals. Challenging common theories of the state, Massicard outlines how the position of the muhtar throws into question an assumed dichotomy between domination and social resistance, and suggests that considerations of circumvention and accommodation are normal attributes of state-society functioning.
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