Suchergebnisse

Contemporary Australian public policy has come to rely increasingly on technical reports produced by commercial consultants in contrast to the traditional approach, which employed disinterested public servants to generate the specialist information required to inform decision makers. This approach is fraught with problems, not least the fact that 'hired guns' have strong incentives to create the 'answers' sought by their employers. By way of a 'cautionary tale', this paper examines the empirical evidence adduced in favour of radical amalgamation of Tasmanian local authorities in Local Government Structural Reform in Tasmania, produced by Deloitte Access Economics (DAE) (2011), and commissioned by the Property Council of Tasmania. In particular, the paper provides a critical analysis of the econometric modelling undertaken in the DAE (2011) Report. We find that if the DAE model is re‐estimated – employing alternative functional forms – then the empirical evidence in support of Tasmania council merges evaporates.

Controversy surrounds structural reform in local government, especially efforts aimed at involuntarily reducing the number of local authorities to secure scale economies. We examined whether scale economies exist in local government outlays by analyzing the expenditure of 152 New South Wales councils. Initially, council expenditure is characterized by scale economies. However, given the correlation between population and population density, it is important to determine whether the influence of population on expenditure is due to variations in population density. When areas are decomposed into subgroups on the basis of density, the evidence of scale economies largely disappears.

AbstractPerceptions of declining academic achievement have motivated a number of governments worldwide to introduce greater school choices to parents in the hope of fostering competition and thus arrest the apparent decline in educational achievement. Exit provides dissatisfied citizens with a decisive mechanism to signal their views regarding the quality of public education institutions. Private exit – abandoning the public education system entirely – is well established in most countries; however, public exit – moving to a separate system of selective high‐quality public schools – is an alternative that exists in only a few jurisdictions. We employ a comprehensive 6‐year panel of data on socio‐educational advantage and academic achievement for an education system which offers both private and public exit choice. In so doing, we show how different exit options affect choices and outcomes for various categories of schools.

Shared services are often lauded as an efficacious means of reducing municipal expenditure and thereby improving waning financial sustainability. However, most of the extant theoretical and empirical work only considers costs and benefits at the level of the specific service in question and, hence, fails to capture many of the wider benefits and costs that might accrue to local governments. In this article we first build a schema to illustrate the benefits and costs of moving from separate to collaborative production at the level of individual local authorities. We then test two hypotheses drawn from the schema against a five‐year panel of expenditure data. We find evidence of increased expenditure in the order of 8 per cent that prima facie runs counter to the objectives of many municipal managers engaged with shared services. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for cooperative ventures between local authorities.

Theorized is that the distribution of municipal services to definable demographic groups is influenced by the valuation of services & the efficiency of the producing organization. Service delivery data are assembled from 3 Detroit bureaucracies: the Environmental Enforcement Division of the Environmental Protection & Maintenance Dept, the Sanitation Division of the same Dept, & the Dept of Parks & Recreation. Supplemental data are taken from the US Census. The strategy is to elaborate on the political & economic approaches & then to "trace the distributional impacts of service rules in the 3 bureaucracies." Routine service delivery rules influence service distribution & each set of rules produces different service distribution patterns. 9 Tables, 3 Figures. D. Neville.

When citizens contact local government agencies, they generally attempt to influence service delivery decisions made by these bureaucracies. This paper examines the nature of citizen contacts, and the results of such contacts, with respect to the enforcement of environmental ordinances in Detroit, Michigan. We first examine the mechanisms responsible for the generation of citizen contacts. Assuming relations among citizen awareness, service need, and social well-being, we derive a downward-opening parabola as appropriate for describing the relationship between social well-being and propensity to contact a service agency. Using data on citizen contacts from City of Detroit agencies merged with census data, we find the expected relationship in evidence. We find that the Environmental Enforcement Division generally responds to citizen contacts, but the quality of the response varies with social characteristics of neighborhoods.

This book brings together the refereed proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Australian Association of Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE) 'Applied Ethics in the Fractured State', held at the Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney in June 2017