This review article explores some of the key concepts, trends, and approaches in contemporary urban governance research. Based on a horizon scan of recent literature and a survey of local government ...officials, it provides a big picture on the topic and identifies areas for future research. Bridging the gap between the scholarly research focus and the perceptions and requirements of city administrators represents a major challenge for the field. Furthermore, because global and comparative research on urban governance is confronted with an absence of systematically collected, comparable data, the article argues that future efforts will require experimenting with methodologies that can generate new empirical insights.
This paper investigates the efficiency of Italian local governments using Stochastic Frontier Analysis for the years 2010-2018. As a dependent variable of the cost function, we consider the total ...current expenditure for producing six 'essential' local public services: education (ancillary services), waste management, general administration, local police, public roads and planning, and social services. As outputs, we employ indicators for each of the six services in the multi-output cost function. In an alternative model specification, we use a composite indicator for the total output volume. Thus, we estimate a global efficiency score for each local government, for each year. The findings reveal that the total expenditure declined over time, more than proportionally than the contraction of output produced. Therefore, the global efficiency of Italian municipalities is estimated to be higher in 2018 than it was in 2010. Moreover, there is evidence of substantial scale economies and congestion effects, with municipalities with around 10,000 inhabitants being more efficient than their smaller and larger counterparts. Lastly, on average, local governments are more efficient in providing public services in the Northern regions than in the Southern ones, although efficiency does not decline monotonically moving South.
Although the local provision of public goods accommodates better to the heterogeneous local preferences and mitigates the fiscal illusion problem, it comes at the cost of potential diseconomies of ...scale. This paper examines the relationship between municipal size and local service level provision by applying state-of-the-art non-parametric techniques to a unique panel dataset of Flemish data. We measure the service provision level by using an innovative robust conditional ‘Benefit of the Doubt’ model and we estimate its efficiency in relationship with the local expenditures by means of a robust conditional Data Envelopment Analysis model. Overall, the main findings suggest the presence of diseconomies of scale, and provide weak evidence on an optimal size of local public good provision of around 10,000 citizens.
•We examine the relationship between municipal size and local service provision.•State-of-the-art non-parametric techniques are applied to Flemish municipalities.•Service provision is measured by an original robust conditional composite indicator.•Municipal expenditure efficiency is assessed by a robust Data Envelopment Analysis.•Results denote scale diseconomies and optimal size around 10,000 citizens.
Food Insecurity during COVID‐19 Gundersen, Craig; Hake, Monica; Dewey, Adam ...
Applied economic perspectives and policy,
March 2021, Volume:
43, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
For a decade, Feeding America's Map the Meal Gap (MMG) has provided sub‐state‐level estimates of food insecurity for both the full population and for children. Along with being extensively used by ...food banks, it is widely used by state and local governments to help plan responses to food insecurity in their communities. In this paper, we describe the methods underpinning MMG, detail the approach Feeding America has used to make projections about the geography of food insecurity in 2020, and how food insecurity rates may have changed due to COVID‐19 since 2018. We project an increase of 17 million Americans who are food insecure in 2020 but this aggregate increase masks substantial geographic variation found in MMG.
In this revelatory account of the people who founded the New England colonies, historian David D. Hall compares the reforms they enacted with those attempted in England during the period of the ...English Revolution. Bringing with them a deep fear of arbitrary, unlimited authority, these settlers based their churches on the participation of laypeople and insisted on "consent" as a premise of all civil governance. Puritans also transformed civil and criminal law and the workings of courts with the intention of establishing equity. In this political and social history of the five New England colonies, Hall provides a masterful re-evaluation of the earliest moments of New England's history, revealing the colonists to be the most effective and daring reformers of their day.
•The RCBF targets conflict with local governments’ interests.•Detailed comparisons are made between the requisitioned farmland and the new farmland for compensation.•Local governments place local ...interests first, farmland quantity second, farmland quality and environmental protection last.•Instead of ensuring food security, the RCBF triggers environmental issues, hence entails two urgent policy shifts.
The Requisition–Compensation Balance of Farmland (RCBF) is a strict policy in China aimed at controlling farmland conversion and replenishing farmland loss caused by urban expansion through a set of top-down quotas. These conflict with local interests, since land conversion from agriculture to construction is a key tool by which local governments attract investment and raise fiscal revenue. How should local authorities respond to this centralized policy? This paper presents a framework “quantity–quality–productivity–environment” to investigate local governments’ coping strategy and the holistic performance of the RCBF. The empirical study indicated that local jurisdictions placed economic and financial growth first and continued expropriating farmland on a large-scale, including land of high quality, for development. However, impelled by compulsory quotas and supervision from governments at higher levels, local authorities would partly replenish the quantity loss through farmland exploitation, regardless of the quality of the new cropland and the possible environmental impact. Consequently, fast requisition and unqualified compensation undermined the capacity of regional agricultural output. We suggest that the RCBF is not capable of guaranteeing food security, whilst farmland supplementation threatens the local environment.
The upsurge of shadow banking is typically driven by rising financing demand from certain real sectors. In China, the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package in 2009 was behind the rapid growth of shadow ...banking after 2012, expediting the development of Chinese corporate bond markets in the poststimulus period. Chinese local governments financed the stimulus through bank loans in 2009 and then resorted to nonbank debt financing after 2012 when faced with rollover pressure from bank debt coming due. Cross-sectionally, using a political-economy-based instrument, we show that provinces with greater bank loan growth in 2009 experienced more municipal corporate bond issuance during 2012–2015, together with more shadow banking activities including trustloans and wealth management products. China’s poststimulus experience exhibits similarities to financial market development during the US National Banking Era.
Intergovernmental conflicts, in Latin America's centralism and the recentralization in Peru, have been more acute over the last 30 years, producing sociopolitical, economic, and cultural problems at ...subnational levels. Based on the design of the grounded theory of Glasser and Strauss, this sociopolitical phenomenon is analyzed from the perspective of local governments in the Puno region to account for the emerging categories and subcategories of analysis regarding the dynamics of intergovernmental relations (IGR) in the local public policy process. The main argument is that, as a result of centralism, recentralization, and intergovernmental conflicts, territorial inequality reproduces and reinforces at the local level. These are expressed in a dichotomy between the deficit territorial dynamics (backward areas) and entrepreneurial territorial dynamics (growth areas). Keywords: intergovernmental relations; recentralization; central government; local government; Peru. Os conflitos intergovernamentais, no contexto do centralismo Latino-americano e da recentralizacao no Peru, se agravaram nos ultimos 30 anos, produzindo varios problemas sociopoliticos, economicos e culturais em niveis subnacionais. Este fenomeno sociopolitico e analisado a partir da perspectiva dos governos locais na regiao de Puno, com base no desenho da Grounded Theory de Glasser e Strauss, para dar conta das categorias e subcategorias emergentes de analise sobre a dinamica das relacoes intergovernamentais (RIG) no processo de politicas publicas locais. O principal argumento e que, como resultado do centralismo, da recentralizacao e dos conflitos intergovernamentais, a desigualdade territorial e reproduzida e reforcada nos niveis locais, expressa em uma dicotomia entre: dinamicas de deficit territorial (areas de atraso) e dinamicas territoriais empreendedoras (areas de crescimento). Palavras-chave: relacoes intergovernamentais; recentralizacao; governo central; governo local; Peru. Los conflictos intergubernamentales, en el contexto del centralismo Latinoamericano y la recentralizacion en el Peru, se han agudizado durante los ultimos 30 anos, produciendo diversos problemas sociopoliticos, economicos y culturales en los ambitos subnacionales. Este fenomeno sociopolitico se analiza desde la perspectiva de los gobiernos locales en la region Puno, basado en el diseno de la Teoria Fundamentada de Glasser y Strauss, para dar cuenta de las categorias y subcategorias de analisis emergentes respecto de la dinamica de las relaciones intergubernamentales (RIG) en el proceso de las politicas publicas locales. El argumento principal es que, como resultado del centralismo, la recentralizacion y los conflictos intergubernamentales, se reproduce y se refuerza la desigualdad territorial en los ambitos locales, expresada en una dicotomia entre: dinamicas territoriales deficitarias (zonas de atraso) y dinamicas territoriales emprendedoras (areas de crecimiento). Palabras clave: relaciones intergubernamentales; recentralizacion; gobierno central; gobierno local; Peru.
Since 1980, over 2,000 local governments in US Atlantic states have been hit by a hurricane. We study local government fiscal dynamics in the aftermath of hurricanes. These shocks reduce tax ...revenues, public expenditures, and debt financing in the decade following a hurricane. Hurricanes create collateral fiscal damage for local governments by increasing the cost of debt at critical moments after a strike. Municipalities with a 1 standard deviation-above-average racial minority composition suffer expenditure losses more than 2 times larger and debt default risk 8 times larger than the average municipalities in the decade following a hurricane strike.
This book develops a new interpretation of the transformation of statehood under contemporary globalizing capitalism. Whereas most analysts of the emergent, post-Westphalian world order have focused ...on supranational and national institutional realignments, this book shows that strategic subnational spaces, such as cities and city-regions, represent essential arenas in which states are being transformed. The book traces the transformation of urban governance in western Europe during the last four decades and, on this basis, argues that inherited geographies of state power are being fundamentally rescaled. Through a combination of theory construction, historical analysis and cross-national case studies of urban policy change, this book provides an analysis of the new formations of state power that are currently emerging.
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