A More Accurate Measure of Local Public Goods: Overlapping Government Combinations as Units of Analysis

Samuel B Stone

doi:10.1155/2014/963503

Abstract

This study posits and tests the viability of a new unit of analysis for local public goods in metropolitan areas: overlapping government combinations (OGCs). Counties, municipalities, school districts, and other special districts operate simultaneously within the same space, each providing their own set of local public goods. Residents of the same city can live within the boundaries of different counties, school districts and other special districts and thus receive (and pay for) very different quantities and qualities of public goods. Though there is a great deal of literature devoted to the variation of local public goods in a fragmented metropolitan region, there is none that cumulates the different local government types into units that represent the true bundles of local public goods that are provided to citizens and property owners. This study tackles this problem through the application of geographic information systems (GIS) to stack counties, municipalities, and school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington CMSA into unique OGCs. The unique OGCs are compared to their underlying component governments with respect to property tax rates and school performance and are found to be statistically distinct.

Highlights

As of this writing, there are 89,000 local governments in the United States including all counties, municipalities, school districts, and other special districts with their own governing bodies [1]
This study demonstrates two things: OGCs constitute distinct units of analysis from their component local governments and OGCs more accurately represent the combinations of local public goods received by citizens and businesses than single government types
The general proposition of this paper is that rather than the dichotomy between fragmentation and regionalization found in the literature, the provision of local public goods is best measured as a continuous set of variables that are spatially distributed across a metropolitan area

Summary

Introduction

There are 89,000 local governments in the United States including all counties, municipalities, school districts, and other special districts with their own governing bodies [1] Each of these jurisdictions provides its residents and property owners with a unique set of local public goods. Because most Americans who live in a metropolitan area live within the boundaries of several different local governments, it makes sense to think of a metropolitan area as collection of these overlapping jurisdictional combinations. This is a novel approach because the empirical literature has not really stepped beyond parcel level studies or government-togovernment studies. There are many examples of research that do take into account and study the effect of multiple overlapping jurisdictions but there are no studies that investigate the viability of using these combinations of overlapping governments as units of analysis themselves

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Conclusion