European local authorities’ financial resilience in the face of austerity: a comparison across Austria, Italy and England

European local authorities have been particularly stricken by the current context of decline and cutback management, and represent an ideal place where to study how governments respond to shocks affecting their financial conditions and management. Along these lines, this paper adopt the perspective of financial resilience for looking at the current context of austerity, and related responses, by shedding new lights on the role of internal capacities and conditions in influencing such responses and, ultimately, performance. Through a multiple case study analysis based on 12 European local authorities in Austria, Italy and England, the paper identifies the main shocks perceived by local management, the related short-term and long-term responses, highlighting the dynamics of financial vulnerabilty, awareness, anticipatory capacity, flexibility and recovery ability (ie, financial resilience) in its interaction with the external context and shocks. From the analysis, four patterns of resilience emerge: pro-active resilience, adaptive resilience, passive/fatalist resilience, complacent resilience

Contrasting and explaining purposeful and legitimizing uses of performance information: a mayor’s perspective

This study looks at purposeful and legitimizing types of performance information use in local governments. Drawing on a survey of Austrian mayors who are at the politico-administrative apex of local government, the paper shows that purposeful and legitimizing uses of performance information coexist, but they appear to be negatively associated. In exploring the contextual and organizational conditions under which legitimizing uses prevail over purposeful ones, the analysis shows that oversight (coercive) and political (normative) pressures, hierarchical culture, and low-performance information availability foster the dominance of the legitimizing use type over the purposeful one

How do local governments respond to shocks? The role of anticipatory capacities and financial vulnerability

The increased uncertainty, volatility and complexity under which governments operate have put great emphasis on how governments respond to shocks and crises. Extant research has mostly studied the causes of and reactions to recent crises, some focusing on local government, with a relative paucity of research on how accounting is implicated in crisis responses at the organizational level. More research is needed to understand how accounting informs responses to crises and shocks influencing perceptions of organizational financial vulnerability and, more generally, affecting organizational capacity to anticipate shocks. This paper builds on previous research on governmental financial resilience to understand how local governments’ responses to shocks are shaped by organizational perceptions of financial conditions and the presence of anticipatory capacities. The concept of financial resilience has been shown to uncover internal capacities that act as shaping forces during crises, contributing to and informing “bouncing back” or “bouncing forward” response strategies. Based on a survey of over 600 local governments in Germany, Italy, and the UK, this paper looks at the role that anticipatory capacities, and associated vulnerabilities, play in determining organizational response strategies (bouncing back vs. bouncing forward) at times of crisis

Local government financial resilience: Germany, Italy and UK compared: with a practical tool-kit for local governments

The increased uncertainty, volatility and complexity under which local governments operate, coupled with recent shocks, starting with the 2008 financial crisis, but also including Brexit and the increasing influx of refugee migrants, have put great emphasis on governmental financial resilience, i.e., how governments cope with shocks affecting their finances. This report increases our understanding of local government financial resilience by presenting the results of a survey of local governments across Italy, the UK and Germany. Analysing the combination of internal and external resilience dimensions against the background of recent crises and across countries, the project not only sheds light on different performance enabling capacities but also helps to achieve a greater understanding of how local governments maintain or build resilience. The capacities, which also assist in keeping particular vulnerabilities in control, are specified in practical guidance linked to this report, a tool-kit for local governments to assess and develop their capacities in order to be better equipped to cope with disruptive events

Governmental financial resilience under austerity in Austria, England and Italy: how do local governments cope with financial shocks?

The recent economic and fiscal crises provide an opportunity for learning lessons of general and practical relevance into how governments face shocks affecting their financial conditions. This article draws on the resilience concept to investigate the organizational capacities that are deployed and/or built by local governments (LGs) to respond to such shocks, looking at their combinations and interactions with environmental conditions. The paper presents the results of a multiple-case analysis of 12 European LGs across Austria, Italy and England. The analysis allows to highlight and operationalize different patterns of financial resilience, i.e. self-regulation, constrained or reactive adaptation, contented or powerless fatalism, that are the result of the interaction and development over time of different internal and external dimensions

Governmental financial resilience: international perspectives on how local governments face austerity

International audienceWe analyze the asymptotic behavior of a partial differential equation (PDE) model for hematopoiesis. This PDE model is derived from the original agent-based model formulated by (Roeder et al., Nat. Med., 2006), and it describes the progression of blood cell development from the stem cell to the terminally differentiated state. To conduct our analysis, we start with the PDE model of (Kim et al, JTB, 2007), which coincides very well with the simulation results obtained by Roeder et al. We simplify the PDE model to make it amenable to analysis and justify our approximations using numerical simulations. An analysis of the simplified PDE model proves to exhibit very similar properties to those of the original agent-based model, even if for slightly different parameters. Hence, the simplified model is of value in understanding the dynamics of hematopoiesis and of chronic myelogenous leukemia, and it presents the advantage of having fewer parameters, which makes comparison with both experimental data and alternative models much easier