Suchergebnisse

The scholarly debate over the rival merits of local government consolidation and fragmentation is an old but enduring one. However, in this debate very little attention has been focused on the political dimension of council amalgamation and fragmentation – yet political considerations play a central role in both the formulation and outcomes of de-concentration policy. The purpose of this article is to fill a gap in the literature by examining local government fragmentation in Ghana from 1988 to 2014. The article does this by identifying the key players and analysing their interests and gains, as well as the tensions arising from the fragmentation exercise. The implications from the Ghanaian case for more general theories of fragmentation are drawn out.

The scholarly debate over the rival merits of local government consolidation and fragmentation is an old but enduring one. However, in this debate very little attention has been focused on the political dimension of council amalgamation and fragmentation – yet political considerations play a central role in both the formulation and outcomes of de-concentration policy. The purpose of this article is to fill a gap in the literature by examining local government fragmentation in Ghana from 1988 to 2014. The article does this by identifying the key players and analysing their interests and gains, as well as the tensions arising from the fragmentation exercise. The implications from the Ghanaian case for more general theories of fragmentation are drawn out.

The present work looks at the relationship between institutional structure and economic performance at the regional level. The work focuses on one particular aspect, the number of municipalities in a given region (municipal fragmentation) and the impact on regional development measured as GDP per capita growth. The impact of municipal fragmentation on regional development is not clear a priori. The theory of fiscal decentralisation maintains that institutions closer to citizens can better deal with their needs, thus providing services and public goods in a more efficient way. This closeness, however, implies the presence of many local governments (e.g., municipalities), which may create problems in terms of policy spillovers and (dis)economies of scale. The present work tests the impact of municipal fragmentation on a sample of OECD TL2 regions, in the period 1996-2011. The analysis shows that the impact of fragmentation on regional performance depends on regional territorial characteristics. In particular, the negative impact of fragmentation increases with the share of regional population living in urban areas. In fact, for ?rural? regions the effect is small or even positive where a high share of the population lives in rural areas. This is because the costs and benefits of decentralisation have a different impact in urban and rural regions. In urban regions, the benefit of internalising policy spillovers (and reducing transaction costs) is higher than the loss of proximity, because population is geographically concentrated and commutes more than population in rural areas, where policy spillovers are smaller and the costs associated with the loss of proximity higher. The implications for countries? economic policies are threefold. Firstly, countries should not consider the degree of administrative fragmentation per se, it is important to weight it for the rural index at the regional level. For instance, when considering France as a whole the level of municipal fragmentation is the second highest among OECD countries, but most of this fragmentation stems from rural regions. Secondly, the analysis implicitly recognises the importance of dealing with governance gaps in urban regions; for instance, the lack of co-operation in transport policies is especially detrimental for the performance of metropolitan areas. Thirdly, the overall effect of a reduction of municipal fragmentation would depend on the types of regions within each country. To sum-up, the present work shows the importance of territorial characteristics for administrative performance, thus advocating for a place-based approach to institutional reforms.

Exploring the outcome of Dutch municipal elections between 1998 and 2018, this paper finds two dominant trends: increasing political fragmentation and localism. When explaining localism, the number of inhabitants, regional diversity and the election year dummies are significant. The last result gives some indication for a welfare hypothesis as a large decentralisation of Dutch social policy took place in 2007 and 2015. Some evidence is found for a merger effect of more or less equal municipalities. There is evidence as well that more fragmentation in the municipal council leads to more aldermen. The number of aldermen is also depending on the number of inhabitants and a merger effect in case of two municipalities.

Abstract
This study evaluates the impact of political fragmentation at the municipal level on public expenditure during the period 2007–2018 for the Peruvian case. The results indicate that the effect of political fragmentation within a municipal council on the spending of the provincial municipality could be non-linear. That is, political fragmentation affects negatively the expenditure in a certain tranche and positively in another. In particular, we observe that the incidence occurs only on the execution of capital expenditure. On the other hand, the political fragmentation of the districts within a province seems not to have a significant effect on the execution of expenditure in coordinated areas such as transport, health, and sanitation. (JEL Codes: E62, H54, H72, P16, P35)

The association between municipal fragmentation and suburban sprawl is examined, based on a cross-sectional analysis of all U.S. and Canadian metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 residents in the 1990s. Results reveal that this association is rather weak but significant and is sustained even when the less fragmented and more compact Canadian metropolitan areas are excluded from the analysis. The impact of residential sprawl on fragmentation is significant, but fragmentation does not predict sprawl. Low levels of fragmentation do not guarantee compact development, but lack of excessive fragmentation might be a precondition for compact development in North America.

This article analyzes the 2018 local elections in Jerusalem, the contested capital of the State of Israel. These elections were unique in terms of their level of competitiveness and fragmentation as well as producing a highly divided local government in the wake of the incumbent mayor's, Nir Barkat's, decision to leave the local political scene and enter national politics. While his party has no representation in city council, the new mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion, built a broadly based new coalition that includes all parties in the council except for Hitorerut, the party that won the most seats and whose mayoral candidate, Ofer Berkovitch, was the runner-up to Lion. With the exception of the ultra-orthodox parties, national political parties that sought to interfere with the local electoral process to promote their candidates and lists by and large failed. Therefore, the governance of the city of Jerusalem once again fell under the control of the ultra-orthodox majority. Furthermore, even though the Arab population of East Jerusalem largely continued its traditional abstention from the electoral process, there was some evidence to suggest that a slight shift was taking place in that community in favor of participating in the institutional process of municipal government and democracy.

This article empirically examines the formation of municipalities in the USA. It traces change in unincorporated areas over decades to determine how basic dimensions of population heterogeneity affect the probability of municipal incorporation. The article also examines how state legislation on local government autonomy affect the probability of municipal incorporation. To guide the research, this article follows theory on local government boundary change and the Tiebout hypothesis – literatures interested in the role of municipal fragmentation in tax-and-service differentials within metropolitan areas. Main findings are that income heterogeneity raises the probability of municipal incorporation and state restrictions on local government autonomy lower that probability. I present a boundaries-normalised data set that can be useful for research extensions.

Modernization of local government leads inevitably to the vexed question of how to structure local government to meet the changed circumstances in which it operates. This acknowledgement is no less so for the Caribbean in general and Jamaica in particular, where forces such as increased suburbanization and higher level of citizen demands on local government have prompted policy to respond to the changing world of local government. The recalibration of local government structure serves key objectives – to achieve economies of scale; to assure organisational viability and to reinvigorate local democracy. The Portmore Municipal Council (PMC) in Jamaica, enacted by the Municipalities Act of 2003 is representative of fragmentation of local government and innovates local policy and administration in two ways: (a) popular election of Mayor; and (b) construction of local/community self-management institutional arrangements. This paper reviews the experience of the PMC during its formative years of operation to determine the extent to which the philosophy and practice of local/community self-management norms are being institutionalised into the operations of the municipality and identify lessons for the broader adoption of a process of municipalisation.

Modernization of local government leads inevitably to the vexed question of how to structure local government to meet the changed circumstances in which it operates. This acknowledgement is no less so for the Caribbean in general and Jamaica in particular, where forces such as increased suburbanization and higher level of citizen demands on local government have prompted policy to respond to the changing world of local government. The recalibration of local government structure serves key objectives – to achieve economies of scale; to assure organisational viability and to reinvigorate local democracy. The Portmore Municipal Council (PMC) in Jamaica, enacted by the Municipalities Act of 2003 is representative of fragmentation of local government and innovates local policy and administration in two ways: (a) popular election of Mayor; and (b) construction of local/community self-management institutional arrangements. This paper reviews the experience of the PMC during its formative years of operation to determine the extent to which the philosophy and practice of local/community self-management norms are being institutionalised into the operations of the municipality and identify lessons for the broader adoption of a process of municipalisation.