地方自治体の共有サービス契約に関する経済的含意

首都大学東

Financial Sustainability and Local Government Reform

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.Financial pressure is increasing for local governments, exacerbated by the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and Covid-19 pandemic. Given the potentially grave consequences which financial stress or collapse can engender on the wider community, financial sustainability has become paramount. To ensure local governments can continue to operate in the long term, various reform programs targeting financial sustainability improvements have been employed. In Australia amalgamation is the preferred policy instrument. To effectively target improvements in financial sustainability, the determinants of financial sustainability must first be identified. Although existing literature has analysed the effects of size, resident deprivation, and external operating environment, many non-conventional internal and external factors have received less scholarly attention. Following this, the success of previous reforms programs must be critically evaluated. To facilitate the learning process, both the processes and outcomes of reforms should be examined. Although a sizable corpus of literature exists on municipal reform, more needs to be done in Australia, particularly with respect to the 2016 New South Wales (NSW) amalgamations. Finally, alternative reform instruments should also be scrutinised. This will enable policymakers to identify if other alternatives exist which may represent a more efficacious, less expensive, or less disruptive solution. This thesis aims to address these gaps in the literature and satisfy the needs of various local government stakeholders. To do so five analyses were conducted, through three key themes relating to (i) the association between non-conventional factors and local government expenditure, (ii) the success of the 2008 Queensland amalgamations and the more recent 2016 NSW ‘Fit For the Future’ reforms, and (iii) the efficacy of shared service arrangements as an alternative to amalgamations. Results suggest the importance of non-conventional factors – political structures and budget accuracy – to financial performance. Moreover, evaluations of the large-scale forced amalgamations in Queensland and NSW cast doubt on the efficacy of amalgamations to address financial sustainability concerns. In addition, a commonly endorsed alternative to amalgamation (shared services) was also found to be wanting. In sum, it was found that conventional reform instruments are unlikely to materially improve financial sustainability. Indeed, it appears that they have only further exacerbated matters. The results emphasise the importance of engaging with academics and the scholarly literature to ensure that the cost savings referred to in policy documents are actually achievable in practice. Moreover, future attention should carefully consider non-conventional approaches, given the significant associations identified

財政の持続可能性と地方自治体改革

東京都立大

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

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

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

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

Fiscal outcomes arising from amalgamation: more complex than merely economies of scale

Local government amalgamations are often prosecuted on the basis of expected efficiencies centred on capturing economies of scale. However, these economies are far from certain or straightforward. This paper draws on the extant literature to first develop a comprehensive picture of the complexity of the fiscal outcomes associated with amalgamation. We then take advantage of an eight-year panel of data and a serendipitous natural experiment to better understand the impact of amalgamation on operating unit costs. Our results confirm that the actual operating cost outcomes of amalgamation were indeed at odds with the expectations of the amalgamation architects