Suchergebnisse

Con la vista puesta en la nueva reforma de los Fondos Estructurales para el próximo periodo de programación, y en la adhesión de nuevos países a la Unión Europea, la constatación de que las disparidades regionales son fuertes y persistentes, y que hay que seguir actuando, vuelve a estar en el punto de mira.Los efectos favorables del Mercado Único no se han repartido homogéneamente a lo largo y ancho de la geografía comunitaria. Es el estudio de las desemejanzas entre países y entre regiones comunitarias nuestro propósito que concluirá con una referencia a la situación de Aragón en el contexto de la Unión Europea.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of intermunicipal cooperation and privatization on the delivery costs of urban solid waste services. The results of our empirical analysis, which we conducted among a sample of very small municipalities, indicate that small towns that cooperate incur lower costs for their waste collection service. Cooperation also raises collection frequency and improves the quality of the service in small towns. By contrast, the form of production, whether it is public or private, does not result in systematic differences in costs. Interestingly, the degree of population dispersion has a significant positive relation with service costs. No evidence of scale economies is found because, it would seem, small municipalities exploit them by means of intermunicipal cooperation.

The main objective of this work is to examine whether small municipalities can reduce costs through cooperation and delegation. We first examine factors explaining the decision of municipalities to cooperate and delegate service delivery responsibility, in this case residential solid waste services, to another government. Furthermore, we estimate the impact of cooperation on the costs of providing residential solid waste services. The empirical analysis is done using a sample of small Spanish municipalities. Results of the empirical analysis suggest that cooperation is a pragmatic choice for municipalities with a sub-optimal size: municipalities that cooperate by delegating face lower costs for residential solid waste services than those that do not. Furthermore, we find that cooperation allows municipalities to save costs once we control for the form of production and other factors explaining costs.

Intermunicipal cooperation is being increasingly adopted in various countries as a part of local service delivery reforms. This paper draws on survey data from Spain's municipalities to examine the reasons underpinning the decisions of local governments to engage in intermunicipal cooperation and privatisation. Our empirical analysis indicates that small municipalities prefer to rely on cooperation for reducing costs, while their larger counterparts prefer to privatise the delivery of services. By cooperating, scale economies can be achieved with lower transaction costs and fewer concerns for competition than is the case via private production.

Este artículo examina los factores que influyen en la privatización de los servicios de residuos sólidos y suministro de agua. Se aprovecha la disponibilidad de datos para una muestra de municipios de Aragón para identificar los aspectos de mayor importancia en municipios de pequeña dimensión. Los resultados del análisis empírico muestran que, para ambos servicios, la situación financiera de los municipios influye de forma significativa en la decisión de privatizar de los municipios pequeños, mientras que los aspectos ideológicos no parecen tener importancia. Las motivaciones referidas a los costes varían en función de las características específicas del servicio considerado. En este sentido, la dispersión de los núcleos de población y la cooperación inter-municipal juegan un papel particularmente relevante en municipios de pequeña dimensión.