Competition, Cooperation, and Local Government

Inspired by the best-selling "Reinventing Government", governments at all levels have decentralized programs and services and introduced market-based competition into operations. The goal of decentralization and privatization is to enhance civic participation and harness the market efficiencies that competition can offer.Decentralization and competition have certainly led to efficiencies and innovation. However, as Mildred Warner argues in her chapter in "Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century", many rural communities with limited resources have been overwhelmed by this new focus on market competition and decentralization.These two forces have reduced small local governments' ability to produce and deliver services, administer municipal functions, and plan and execute strategies for further development. The pressures risk exacerbating inequality between rural and urban areas as rural governments with limited means fall even farther behind wealthier communities that can compete more successfully for development, tax base, and contracts with private-sector service providers.This issue brief is a joint product of the Rural Sociological Society and the National Coalition for Rural Entrepreneurship, a collaboration of four Regional Rural Development Centers: The Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development, the Southern Rural Development Center, the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, and the Western Rural Development Center. Funding was also made available from the Ford Foundation.This brief is part of a policy brief series by the Rural Sociological Society and the Regional Rural Development Centers that stresses the importance of community collective action and developing the capacity of people and organizations to meet the community's needsThe Rural Sociological Society and the Regional Rural Development Centers creates new Public Policy Issue Brief series based on its recent book, "Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century".The briefs synthesize the context and substance of important issues raised in the book and address alternative policy options, with the goal of bringing important research to the policy community

An Environmental Risk index to Evaluate Pesticide Programs in Crop Budgets

A.E. Res. 85-1

Does Local Government Size Matter? Privatization and Hybrid Systems of Local Service Delivery

No abstract is available for this item

Disaster Relief Medicaid Evaluation Project

[Excerpt] This study is a retrospective evaluation of the enrollment processes and service delivery associated with DRM. It examines this unexpected experiment and assesses the outcomes. This report begins with an overview of the Medicaid/Family Health Plus program in September 2001, and is followed by a description of the challenges of, and responses to, the World Trade Center disaster. It then looks at how well the DRM process worked, how accessible needed services were for recipients, how costs compared to costs associated with those previously enrolled in the traditional Medicaid program, and how the different eligibility/verification procedures affected program integrity. Finally, in the section Background Information: Detailed History of Disaster Relief Medicaid, it presents a narrative timeline, detailing the decision steps by which DRM was implemented

Is Private Production of Public Services Cheaper than Public Production? A meta-regression analysis of solid waste and water services

Privatization of local government services is assumed to deliver cost savings but empirical evidence for this from around the world is mixed. We conduct a meta-regression analysis of all econometric studies examining privatization for water distribution and solid waste collection services and find no systematic support for lower costs with private production. Differences in study results are explained by differences in time-period of the analyses, service characteristics, and policy environment. We do not find a genuine empirical effect of cost savings resulting from private production. The results suggest that to ensure cost savings, more attention be given to the cost characteristics of the service, the transaction costs involved, and the policy environment stimulating competition, rather than to the debate over public versus private delivery of these services.Privatization, contracting-out, costs, local governments, meta-regression analysis.

Cities and Sustainability: Polycentric Action and Multilevel Governance

Polycentric theory, as applied to sustainability policy adoption, contends that municipalities will act independently to provide public services that protect the environment. Our multilevel regression analysis of survey responses from 1,497 municipalities across the United States challenges that notion. We find that internal drivers of municipal action are insufficient. Lower policy adoption is explained by capacity constraints. More policymaking occurs in states with a multilevel governance framework supportive of local sustainability action. Contrary to Fischel’s homevoter hypothesis, we find large cities and rural areas show higher levels of adoption than suburbs (possibly due to free riding within a metropolitan region)

Does public ownership of utilities matter for local government water policies?

What differentiates local governments that implement water policies on equity and the environment? Analyzing a 2015 survey of 1,897 U.S. municipalities, we find municipalities that own their water utilities more likely have policies to protect low-income residents from disconnection and to implement water resource management. Respondents from 8% of municipalities report protecting residents from disconnection. State economic regulation of publicly owned utilities and Democrat-majority municipal governments are positively associated with policies protecting low-income households from shutoffs but bear no association with resource management. Public ownership of utilities and state economic regulation may play a role in meeting water policy goals

Inter-municipal cooperation and costs: Expectations and evidence

Austerity and fiscal crisis make the search for cost saving reforms in local government more critical. While cost savings from privatization have frequently proven ephemeral, inter-municipal cooperation has been a relatively understudied reform. We analyze the literature on cost savings under cooperation and find savings are dependent on (1) the cost structure of public services, particularly those related to scale and density economies and externalities, (2) the structure of local government (size, metropolitan location, powers granted by the nation or regional state), and 3) the governance framework at the local/regional scale where cooperation varies from informal to formal. European studies give more emphasis to cost savings, while US studies focus on coordination concerns arising from the higher degree of devolution in the US local government system