Provision Of Local Public Services Research Articles

New challenges of local and regional public service provision: platforms and their cybersecurity issues

New challenges of local and regional public service provision: platforms and their cybersecurity issues

Board composition and performance of state-owned enterprises: quasi-experimental evidence

Abstract We analyze the impact of board composition on the performance of companies controlled by public entities in Italy, using a reform-induced change. The law’s provisions, aimed at increasing female representation and at reducing the revolving-door phenomenon, were binding for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), but not for companies with a minority share of public ownership, allowing to adopt a difference-in-differences estimation. Results show that female presence on the boards of directors of SOEs increased, while that of former politicians decreased. New directors replaced older and less talented men, thereby rejuvenating the boards and improving their quality. To assess the effects on firm performance, we analyze companies’ balance sheets and survey information on citizens’ satisfaction with the provision of local public services and on objective measures of their quality. While firm productivity remains unaffected, we find that profitability increases and leverage decreases, thereby lowering corporate credit risk, and that SOEs’ output quality improves (JEL G34, L32, H42).

Territorial diagnostics and citizen perception of municipal public management, towards an efficient reform of Local Administration

Spain has a population distribution dispersed in small population centres where 60% of municipalities have less than 1,000 inhabitants. This situation generates a financial and functional incapacity to guarantee the successful and efficient provision of local public services. In order to fulfil its competences and improve services, a territorial diagnosis of the investigated area is necessary to adapt the size and structure of its administration. However, the social superstructure is reluctant to change the form of administrative action, despite being perceived as slow and bureaucratic by citizens. For this reason, this work proposes a reform to improve local economic and financial management by redesigning its administrative structure, thus achieving citizen recognition of the advantages of change. The proposal is developed through a computerised reporting model for public decision-making, the result of which is a systematic spatial report of administrative-financial decisions, which optimises decision-making and makes public management more visible.

Extending the Interdependence Theory to Local Public Service Provision: Evidence from Iowa

Abstract Lester Salamon’s interdependence theory has held up over time and across dozens of national contexts. However, the theory has largely been developed through data on government partnerships with nonprofits for providing social services. While government-nonprofit partnerships exist in various service areas and policy contexts, the theory has rarely been applied in less “traditional” service settings. We apply a mixed-method sequential research design – empirical analysis followed by a comparative case analysis – to understand the descriptive and explanatory power of Salamon’s interdependence theory and to differentiate its applications from other theories of government-nonprofit partnerships. Our analysis shows that nonprofits are extensively engaged in public service delivery at the local level, partnering with county and municipal governments to carry out essential public services well beyond the scope of social welfare functions and human services. Expanding the concept of interdependence theory, our findings further show that in local service delivery settings, there is a unique balancing of aspects of both voluntary and government failure that can be achieved.

Cost Efficiency in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW): Different Alternatives in Service Delivery for Small and Medium Sized Spanish Local Governments

The provision of local public services has become one of the main concerns of local governments. Therefore, the selection of the most appropriate form of management to maximize efficiency levels in the provision of local public services has been widely analyzed throughout the academic literature. In this context, the aim of this paper is to add new knowledge to the literature on efficiency in the provision of local public services. To this end, we propose the study of four forms of management (interested indirect management; indirect management by concession; intermunicipal co-operation; public service provision) through a free disposal hull data panel (FDHDP) methodology for the 2014–2016 period. We find that public-private partnership contracting is less efficient on waste removal services when accounting for quality. However, the promised benefits of contracting out are realized when contractors are made responsive to service quality through concessions.

Evidence on economies of scale in local public service provision: A meta‐analysis

AbstractThe standard theory of optimal jurisdictional size hinges on the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods and services. However, despite its relevance for forced local amalgamation programs and related policies, the empirical evidence on the existence of such economies of scale remains elusive. The main goal of this paper is to produce an updated and comprehensive quantitative review of the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods using a meta‐analysis approach to systematize the wide range of empirical approaches and modeling frameworks found in the previous literature. Our analysis confirms the presence of moderately increasing to constant returns to scale in the provision of local services with no reduction in the average costs of production in the delivery of most local public services beyond a certain, modest jurisdictional size, which many studies have estimated at 10,000 residents. Also, the potential for economies of scale differs at least across three traditional services: education, water and sanitation, and garbage collection, being highest for education and lowest for garbage collection. Our analysis also offers guidelines for future empirical research in this area. Physical output and production cost data should be used, together with translog specifications for the modeling of cost functions. Last, we find evidence that the determinants of output cost elasticity include bidirectional publication bias and population density but do not include the presence or absence of modern “lean” production technologies or the (perceived) capital intensity of the sector, contrary to conventional wisdom. These findings have significant policy implications for countries considering jurisdictional consolidation programs.

A realist approach to understanding alliancing within Local Government public health and social care service provision.

Within the current context of continued austerity and post-pandemic recovery, it remains important that Local Government services address the increasing needs of residents as cost-effectively as possible. Alliancing, whereby services work collaboratively focusing on the 'whole-system', has gained popularity as a tool with the potential to support collaborative whole systems approaches. This synthesis aims to identify how alliancing can be successfully operationalised in the commissioning of public health, wider National Health Service (NHS) and social care-related services. A realist literature synthesis was undertaken in order to identify underlying generative mechanisms associated with alliancing, the contextual conditions surrounding the implementation and operationalisation of the alliancing approach mechanisms, and the outcomes produced as a result. An iterative approach was taken, using a recent systematic review of the effectiveness of Alliancing, online database searches, and grey literature searches. Three mechanistic components were identified within the data as being core to the successful implementation of alliances in public health and social care-related services within Local Government: (i) Achieving a system-level approach; (ii) placing local populations at the heart of the system; and (iii) creating a cultural shift. Programme theories were postulated within these components. The alliancing approach offers an opportunity to achieve system-level change with the potential to benefit local populations. The realist synthesis approach taken within this study has provided insights into the necessary contextual and mechanistic factors of the Alliancing approach, above and beyond effectiveness outcomes typically collected through more conventional evaluation methodologies.

External drivers of participation in regional collaborative water planning

AbstractWhat drives participation in collaborative planning? How does this vary across different institutional contexts? Public managers must navigate emerging challenges in public service provision; perceived risk and capacity to act can play a pivotal role, shaping managerial behavior. In water management, for example, issues stemming from climate change and water‐intensive growth create new concerns about continued water supply. Strategic decisions may improve local public service provision, but can also have cascading effects on other systems, as water is a mobile—and subtractable—resource. Many public water systems have participated in collaborative planning to overcome collective challenges for this reason, but participation is not feasible for all prospective participants. Using data from administrative records and surveys, we fit a binomial logistic model to examine the roles of capacity and perceived risk among water service providers as drivers of participation in collaborative planning forums. By evaluating this relationship in California and North Carolina, we find similar results across unique institutional contexts: participation in regional water planning is associated with perceived risk to water supply from changing climatic conditions, but not from perceived risk of changing patterns of demand. Also, system capacity—as measured by the size of the population served—corresponds to increased likelihood of participation.

Local autonomy and service delivery: how does home rule shape the provision of local public services?

ABSTRACT This article investigates how granting local governments more autonomy changes their performance by exploring the effect of home rule adoption on municipality expenditure policies. This article uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that focuses on municipalities in Illinois. The empirical evidence shows that the adoption of home rule has significant and positive effects on allocational expenditures. While developmental expenditures decreased significantly after the adoption of home rule, redistributive expenditures changed little. These results apply in particular to municipalities that have homogeneous residents, that face a low degree of government fragmentation, or that are without a professional manager.

Quality of local government and social trust in European cities

Communities are responsible for a range of public services and represent critical experiential contexts for social interactions between residents. However, the role of local governance and public service provision for creating social trust has received limited attention so far. This study examines how quality, efficiency and fairness of local public service provision relates to social trust. Using multilevel models on repeated cross-sectional survey data from the Quality of Life in European Cities project, we test the relationship between time-varying city-level indicators of quality of local government and social trust. The empirical results show that an increase in the dimension of local public service quality is substantially associated with an increase in social trust. We find improvements in sport and leisure facilities as well as the state of public spaces, streets and buildings to be particularly relevant.

Local Public Services Delivery Mechanisms: A Literature Review

The paper presents a literature review about local public services delivery mechanisms like: in-house provisions, privatization, and inter-municipal cooperation. The aim of this paper is to review the development of the studied field, to find out which delivery mechanism dominates in a certain period of time, and to review which economic research focus dominates in the studied field. Possible effects on the economies of scale, costs reductions, efficiency, and other economic-political-institutional-social factors in the provision of local public services are scrutinized, using a content analysis breakdown. Results show that most studies are country studies and empirical studies in increasing numbers in recent years. The choice of local public services delivery mechanisms are mostly influenced by the size of the local government, the efficiency of service provision, the resources available, and the institutional framework. Politics and market competition also play a role in the decision-making process.

Spatial Accessibility to Local Public Services in an Unequal Place: An Analysis from Patterns of Residential Segregation in the Metropolitan Area of Santiago, Chile

The study of the relationship between the provision of local public services and residential segregation is critical when it might be the social manifestation of spatial income inequality. This paper analyzes how the spatial accessibility to local public services is distributed equitably among different social and economic groups in the Metropolitan Area of Santiago (MR), Chile. To accomplish this objective, I use accessibility measures to local public services such as transportation, public education, healthcare, kindergartens, parks, fire and police stations, cultural infrastructure, and information about housing prices and exempted housing units from local taxes by block, as well as quantile regressions and bivariate Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA). The main results confirm the accessibility to local public services is unequally distributed among residents. However, it affects more low-income groups who are suffering from significant deficits in the provision of local public services. In this scenario, poor residents face a double disadvantage due to their social exclusion from urban systems and their limited access to essential services such as education, healthcare, or transportation. In particular, I found that social residential segregation might be reinforced by insufficient access to local infrastructure that the most impoverished population should assume.

Board Composition and Performance of State-owned Enterprises: Quasi-experimental Evidence

The quality of governance crucially affects corporate outcomes, and may be particularly important for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) not disciplined by market competition forces. We examine the impact of board composition on the performance of companies controlled by public entities in Italy. For this purpose, we exploit a reform-induced exogenous change in board composition, aimed at increasing female representation and at reducing the revolving-door phenomenon. The law’s provisions were binding for SOEs, but not for companies with a minority share of public ownership, allowing us to adopt a difference-in-differences estimation. The results show that female presence on the boards of directors of SOEs has increased, while that of former politicians has decreased. The new directors have mostly replaced older and less talented men, thereby rejuvenating the boards and improving their quality. To assess the effects of the board shake-up on firm performance, we analyse companies’ balance sheets and survey information on citizens’ satisfaction with the provision of local public services and on objective measures of their quality. While we detect no significant effects on firm productivity, we find that profitability increases and leverage decreases, thereby reducing corporate credit risk. Finally, there is evidence consistent with an improvement in the quality of SOEs’ output.

Plural Governance for the Management of Local Public Services: An Empirical Investigation on the French Car Park Industry

This paper investigates the use of plural governance for the provision of local public services. Most of the studies conducted on local data compare direct public provision (i.e., in-house provision where governments produce public services themselves, using their own equipment and employees) to contracting out. But governments actually face a more complex set of choices than the simple make-or-buy dichotomy. In particular, cities can simultaneously opt for the ‘make’ and ‘buy’ alternatives for the provision of the same public service, and thus produce a portion of the service themselves while contracting with external (public or private) companies. We show how contractual perspectives and the resource-based view of the firm help to understand the rationales behind plural sourcing. Organizations appear to be able to adopt this governance structure to enhance efficiency since it enables them to employ benchmarking strategies. However, authors in public management insist on the specificities of public sector contracting, and our analysis also includes political measures, such as the number of changes of political affiliation at the head of cities. Our empirical analysis examines data about car park management by 97 municipalities in 2010. We use a multinomial logit to compare three distinct alternatives: total internal provision, complete externalization, and plural sourcing. Our results clearly indicate that plural sourcing is a strategic choice that is adopted by municipalities to reduce the cost of service delivery when they suffer from high levels of fiscal stress. Plural governance does not result from the alternation of political parties in power, indicating that political factors do not play a significant role in explaining that sourcing decision.

Öffentliche Bibliotheken als dritte Orte und Bildungsgerechtigkeit in Zeiten von Covid-19

Zusammenfassung Die Corona-Krise hat weitreichende Konsequenzen für den Betrieb kommunaler Einrichtungen in ganz Europa. Besonders die freiwilligen Einrichtungen der kulturellen Bildung wie Öffentliche Bibliotheken, die jenseits der formalen Bildung einen Beitrag zur Bildungsgerechtigkeit leisten, wurden geschlossen. Öffentliche Bibliotheken mussten ihre Dienstleistungen und Angebote anpassen und neue Formate entwickeln. Der Beitrag zeigt die aktuellen Entwicklungen in Deutschland und Europa auf und beleuchtet die Folgen für die Bildungsgerechtigkeit in Städten und Kommunen.

All‐of‐government response to the COVID‐19 pandemic: The case of Vietnam

All‐of‐government response to the COVID‐19 pandemic: The case of Vietnam

Local fiscal policies and their impact on the number and spatial distribution of new firms

We examine the effect of local business taxation and local public good and service (PIGS) provision on the number and spatial distribution of new firms. Testing ground is Germany and we rely on the universe of firm foundations between 1998 and 2006. Methodologically, we estimate fixed effects poisson models coupled with a control function approach. The results suggest that a 1%-decrease in the business tax rate (the PIGS capital stock) raises (lowers) the number of new firms in the policy-changing jurisdiction by 4.6% (0.8%). Business tax reductions, moreover, strongly reduce the number of firm foundations in neighboring municipalities, implying that the aggregate number of new firms remains unchanged; while PIGS provision, on average, does not impact the number of firms in adjacent jurisdictions, negative effects emerge for subsets of PIGS and firms.

REGIONAL DISPARITIES, PUBLIC POLICIES AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN BRAZIL

Fiscal Federalism, the division of economic responsibilities between the central and local government, has been an ongoing debate. The few existing studies on Brazilian’s fiscal structure facing regional economic growth shows conflicting results. However fiscal decentralization can lead to a more efficient provision of local public goods and services to promote welfare state, citizen’s preferences and economic growth, Brazil's policymakers seem to have a different view. In a country where only three states in 26 hold 53% of Brazil’s PNB, disparities shows-up claiming to be solved. There are still some questions as to whether all regions can achieve real gains with greater autonomy. Decentralization may not solve all subnational entities problems, especially the issue of the poorer regions losing competitiveness about the richer regions, which increases regional disparities. In this way, more recent studies have focused on the different channels through which fiscal decentralization can affect the issue of disparities such as taxes and duties, the autonomy of spending and vertical fiscal imbalance. The present work investigates the relationship between fiscal decentralization, regional disparities and economic growth within 26 Brazilian’s states and Federal District, in the period 2001-2012. Attention was given to channels through which decentralization can affect inequality: human capital, vertical fiscal imbalance, population’s geographic concentration, and local taxes. The empirical analysis suggests that a decentralized fiscal structure can reduce regional disparities by implementing better government policies that favor local economic development.

Does Diversity Undermine the Welfare State? Evidence from the Provision of Local Public Services in European Regions

SUMMARYThe management of the welfare state in a heterogeneous society is a growing challenge in Europe. This paper investigates the relationship between diversity and the welfare state by studying the citizens’ satisfaction about public services across European regions; it also establishes a link between research on diversity and the welfare state, and fiscal federalism theory, by focusing on the provision of local public services. We employ region level indicators of the citizens’ perception of local public services, regional autonomy, and regional diversity based on nationalities. We find that i) diversity is negatively correlated with the quality of local public services; and ii) regional autonomy partially improves the quality in the presence of diversity. When using objective measures of public services, the results are less robust; this raises an issue about the citizens’ perception about the functioning of the welfare state in heterogeneous communities which deserves attention from policy makers.

Risk Analysis – Opportunity or Threat to Financial Management of Municipalities

The topic of the article is the issue of risk regarding municipalities. For the purpose of this article, we understand the risk as a risk of occurrence, which may adversely affect the achievement of the stated objectives. The basic objective of the municipality is to nurture the development of its territory, the quality of life of its inhabitants and the quality of public services provided. The article sets out three goals, such as to evaluate whether a large number of small municipalities in the Czech Republic shall be understood as a risk or as an opportunity. In the Czech Republic, 77% of municipalities have under 1,000 inhabitants, the average population of the municipality in the Czech Republic is 1,695, which is the smallest of the CEE countries. A large number of municipalities up to 1,000 inhabitants can be considered as a risk factor, primarily from the point of view of financial management of municipalities. At the same time, this can be seen as an opportunity for local co-operation, pooled purchases, or alternative public service provision. The second objective was to analyse the ways of providing public services by municipalities. The third objective was to process a case study – the risk analysis of the city of Ústí nad Labem and compare the results with the city of Pardubice.