Is a problem shared a problem halved? Shared services and municipal efficiency

© 2018 Institute of Public Administration Australia It has long been argued that shared services represent an efficacious means of securing efficiencies for municipalities. Indeed, pressures from fiscal austerity, taxation limitations, and the specter of forced amalgamations have resulted in an increasing uptake of shared service arrangements. However, the extant evidence is rather inconclusive and is largely restricted to analyzing the nett efficiency outcomes for the specific service shared. We broaden this evidential base by examining the association between shared service production and the efficiency of entire municipalities. Our analysis, employing a 5-year panel of data, suggests that shared services are associated with a statistically significant reduction in overall municipal efficiency. We conclude by explicating on the public policy implications arising from our prima facie surprising results

Do Municipal Mergers Improve Technical Efficiency? An Empirical Analysis of the 2008 Queensland Municipal Merger Program

© 2017 Institute of Public Administration Australia Municipal mergers remain an important instrument of local government policy in numerous countries, including Australia, despite some concerns surrounding its efficacy. We consider the claim that amalgamations enhance the technical efficiency of the merged entities by examining the 2008 Queensland compulsory consolidation program that reduced the number of local authorities from 157 to 73 councils. To test the claim, we conduct locally inter-temporal data envelopment analysis over the period 2003–2013 inclusive. Our evidence suggests that (1) in the financial year preceding the mergers, there was no statistically significant difference in the typical efficiency scores of amalgamated and non-amalgamated councils and (2) 2 years following the mergers, the typical technical efficiency score of the amalgamated councils was well below the non-amalgamated cohort. We argue this may be attributed to increased spending on staffing expenses, although comparatively larger operational expenditure also served to diminish efficiency

Good to share? The pecuniary implications of moving to shared service production for local government services

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 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

The motivations for the adoption of management innovation by local governments and its performance effects

This article analyses the economic, political and institutional antecedents and performance effects of the adoption of shared Senior Management Teams (SMTs) – a management innovation (MI) that occurs when a team of senior managers oversees two or more public organizations. Findings from statistical analysis of 201 English local governments and interviews with organizational leaders reveal that shared SMTs are adopted to develop organisational capacity in resource‐challenged, politically risk‐averse governments, and in response to coercive and mimetic institutional pressures. Importantly, sharing SMTs may reduce rather than enhance efficiency and effectiveness due to redundancy costs and the political transaction costs associated with diverting resources away from a high‐performing partner to support their lower‐performing counterpart

The price of populism: The association between directly elected mayors and unit expenditure in local government

© 2018 Lex localis. It would appear that directly elected Mayors have indeed become fashionable. However, few seem to have paused to ponder the pecuniary impact of directly elected Mayors on local government: Indeed there is no evidence at all from the Antipodes and much of the extant work is somewhat dated. We analyse a five year panel of data for New South Wales, Australia and find evidence of strong and statistically significant increased unit operational expenditure in local governments that employ the directly elected mayor model. We conclude by outlining the effect that this association might have on local government sustainability

Worth the wait: The impact of government funding on hospital emergency waiting times.

In the absence of a price mechanism, emergency department waiting times act as a rationing device to equate demand for treatment with available supply. Sustained increases to demand stemming from population growth, aging populations, and rising comorbidities has caused waiting times internationally to rise. This has resulted in increased calls for higher funding from governments and commitments from both state and national governments to address excessive waiting times. This paper aims to determine the effectiveness of government funding for improving the median waiting times for treatment and the proportion of patients seen within clinically recommended waiting times. For this purpose, an econometric analysis was conducted on a panel of data on Victorian local health networks over the period 2015-2018. This is supplemented with a discussion of the alternative measures which governments might take to both address demand for emergency treatment, and also ensure that waiting time reductions can be maintained over the long-term

Community engagement in Australian local governments: a closer look and strategic implications

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Public input into decision-making through participatory and deliberative democratic practices has become a widely accepted and legislated responsibility of Australian local governments. At any one time, councils are leading submission processes, workshops and online surveys on a multitude of projects, ranging from long-term community strategic plans to public art projects. The increase in these practices has been exponential, leaving little time for critical reflection. The lack of empirical data to illustrate how community engagement is understood and practised in different councils has hindered sector-wide reflection. This paper presents the findings of the ‘Local Government Community Engagement Census’, a survey of 175 councils–approximately half–from 4 of Australia’s eastern states. This sectoral snapshot provides a picture of how councils understand, prioritise and practise community engagement, allowing critical reflection, an interpretation of implications and suggesting areas for future research

No panacea: Rate-capping in South Australian local government

State-imposed limitations on local government revenue and expenditure represent an especially draconian form of regulation. In Australian local government, New South Wales (NSW) has a longstanding rate-pegging regime, the Northern Territory (NT) caps mining and pastoral rates and Victoria has just implemented rate-capping. In addition, recent attempts have been made to introduce rate-pegging into South Australia (SA). This paper empirically assesses the likely impact of a rate-cap in SA local government by comparing the performance of SA with its NSW counterparts on three separate key measures (revenue effort, financial sustainability and efficiency) for the period 2013 to 2016. The paper demonstrates that – by comparison with NSW – SA municipalities’ exhibit superior performance on these measures. The empirical evidence presented in the paper demonstrates that rate-pegging should not be imposed on SA local government and instead other more promising policies considered