Joseph Drew
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 4179812 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Joseph Drew |
| NOMBRES | Joseph |
| APELLIDO | Drew |
| FIRMA | DREW J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of New England |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3579-5758 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 46 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 237 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1885 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Rules of Evidence, Efficiency Claims, and Local Government Amalgamation
Scholars have expressed frustration that public policy formulation sometimes proceeds with optimism that lies in stark contrast to the evaluation literature. We present theoretical insights from the rules of evidence that cast greater light on why this might be so. We also conduct novel sophisticated empirical analysis – based on a natural experiment in New South Wales, Australia – to better measure the efficiency outcomes at the heart of most am…
Térbeli egyenlőtlenségek és szubszidiaritás központosított föderalista rendszerben
Australia is imbalanced geographically and politically: its growth is extremely concentrated in four major city-regions that stand in contrast to sparsely populated, stagnant rural areas. Its political power is exceptionally centralized, consisting of vertical fiscal imbalance between the Commonwealth and the states, and particularly weak local governments. This study focuses on spatial disparities in school achievements and resources, and the ef…
Fiscal outcomes arising from amalgamation
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 bet…
Is ‘more’ better? Testing the assumption that larger local governments are more sustainable
It is commonly assumed that bigger local governments will be more financially sustainable. Indeed, public policymakers are often prompted to make boundary change decisions according to idealised structures that they assume will lead to stronger local governments. In addition, many local government regulators urge councillors to work for growth in order to become sustainable. However, the assumption that size is associated with financial sustainab…
The other side of the local government ledger—The association between revenue growth and population growth
Population growth exerts an impact on both sides of the local government accounting ledger—expenditure and revenue. Despite this fact, the vast scholarly literature on local government finance has been myopically focussed on expenditure functions. This apparent neglect to also consider the revenue side of the ledger is problematic because many regulators across the globe have exhorted local governments to pursue growth according to the assumption…
The temporal dependence of public policy evaluation
Amalgamation has been a cornerstone of many local government reform programmes internationally. However, there has been a lack of consensus in the academic literature surrounding the outcomes associated with amalgamation. One potential explanation for this is the difference in the length of time over which the evaluation takes place. In order to determine if the impacts of boundary reform are indeed temporally dependent on nature, we collected an…
Natural Law & Government
Did amalgamation make local government more fit for the future
Local government amalgamations, mostly aimed at improving financial sustainability, remain a strongly contested public policy option. Proponents of amalgamation tend to emphasise the advantages of scale and plan around population size targets. By contrast, some scholars note the importance of understanding the needs and tastes of residents for local public services and stress the dangers of amalgamation dominated by population size considerations…
Successfully navigating the fiscal challenges of the age of the aged
Ageing populations have been identified as a looming fiscal threat to many developed nations across the world. However, in Japan, both the scale of the problem and the institutional context is such that it represents a rather desperate predicament. Within the next 25 years it is projected that over a quarter of Japan's local governments will have the majority of their population composed of senior citizens. This is problematic because as populati…
The principle of subsidiarity and Covid-19
Much has been written about the public policy success of measures taken in response to COVID-19 from health, political and economic perspectives. However, considerably less effort has been put into evaluating the coronavirus public policy responses according to moral frameworks. This seems somewhat surprising given that coronavirus responses were principally motivated by moral considerations – especially concern for the vulnerable. The main contr…
The moral justification and practice of intergovernmental equalisation grants to local government – A subsidiarity perspective
Decentralised government – such as local government – allows for better tailoring of goods and services and hence higher levels of economic welfare. However, inequities in wealth can mean that some local governments experience difficulty trying to provide for the needs of their citizens. To try to mitigate these disparities, most systems of local government feature a program of untied equalisation grant transfers. However, proponents of equalisat…
Subsidiarity and the Moral Justification of Intergovernmental Equalization Grants to Decentralized Governments
An important problem with decentralized government relates to its tendency to create disparities between the various units with respect to their capability to provide public goods. In response to this problem, intergovernmental equalization grant transfers are a ubiquitous feature of many systems of decentralized government. However, since the earliest times, scholars of fiscal federalism have struggled to provide a convincing moral justification…
Administering faith
Australia’s education landscape is almost unique among developed nations in having a high proportion of students taught at non-government schools by a diverse range of religious providers, which receive relatively high levels of government funding. It therefore offers the ideal setting for a study on the outcomes achieved by students at schools administered by the major faith providers relative to their peers in government institutions. We take a…
Private exit, public exit, and achievement in secondary education
Perceptions of declining academic achievement have motivated a number of governments worldwide to introduce greater school choices to parents in the hope of fostering competition and thus arrest the apparent decline in educational achievement. Exit provides dissatisfied citizens with a decisive mechanism to signal their views regarding the quality of public education institutions. Private exit – abandoning the public education system entirely – i…
Does religious affiliation influence trust
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to estimate and explore how religious affiliation may influence general and local trust in contemporary society. Design/methodology/approach This paper employs data from the 2010 and 2014 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. The association between religious affiliation and trust was estimated using an ordered logistic regression and conventional ordinary least squares model.…
Can local government by lottery increase democratic responsiveness
In recent years, scholars have paid significant attention to the role of decentralisation in restraining government power and budgetary excess. Yet growth in taxation and debt in OECD countries suggests that such measures have often had a limited effect in taming ‘local Leviathans’. In response, this Research Provocation sets out a bold alternative vision, advocating the use of sortition – the deliberate introduction of arationality and chance in…
Rhetoric in municipal amalgamations
There is a large literature that seeks to evaluate municipal amalgamations ex post, but a relative dearth of scholarly inquiry into the practical political task of persuading the public to accept amalgamations ex ante. We address this important gap in the literature by conducting a rhetorical analysis to ascertain what types of arguments are believed to be efficacious for persuasion on amalgamation. We find evidence to suggest belief in the effic…
How losers can turn into winners in disputatious public policy
The study of heresthetic is a quest to explain how potential political losers might become winners. Local Government amalgamation is invariably a controversial and hotly contested political decision. It thus represents the ideal context to locate a pedagogical discussion regarding how clever herestheticians might act to bring about unlikely political success. Specifically, we extend the heresthetic literature by drawing attention to the costs (op…
Is a problem shared a problem halved? Shared services and municipal efficiency
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 …
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 th…
Framing unpopular policies and creating policy winners
This article deals with a critical challenge for policymakers: how can political actors become policy winners in areas where they have previously experienced resounding losses? To address this puzzle, the article develops William Riker's concept of heresthetic, which describes how clever actors can disrupt the equilibrium of the political opposition by re-framing people's choices in such a way that they are inclined to contribute to their cause. …
Do Municipal Mergers Improve Technical Efficiency? An Empirical Analysis of the 2008 Queensland Municipal Merger Program
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‐tempo…
No Aladdin’s Cave in New South Wales? Local Government Amalgamation, Scale Economies, and Data Envelopment Analysis Specification
Local government structural reform programs are often based on the purported benefits of increased scale. We examine this question in relation to the proposed amalgamation program for New South Wales (NSW) by the NSW Independent Local Government Review Panel using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We find evidence that a significant proportion of municipalities scheduled for amalgamation already exceed optimal scale and that the great majority of …
The Price of Democracy? Political Representation Structure and Per Capita Expenditure in Victorian Local Government
Local government systems across the world face acute and ongoing fiscal challenges. In Australia, the regulatory response has focused squarely on council consolidation. This has, unfortunately, meant that comparatively little attention has been paid to alternate, less disruptive methods for enhancing municipal sustainability. One such possibility lies in modifying the structure of local political representation. We conduct a number of estimations…
Subsidiarity
A common interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity in the federalism literature is that decentralized government, which is closer to the people, is better able to respond to the preferences of its citizens. However, when the principle is denuded of its moral foundations in this fashion it not only fails to provide the grounding for achieving human dignity and the common good, but may also become the harbinger of fiscal crises and social dys…
Did the Big Stick Work? An Empirical Assessment of Scale Economies and the Queensland Forced Amalgamation Program
In 2007, the Queensland Government imposed forced amalgamation with the number of local authorities falling from 157 to just 73 councils. Amalgamation was based inter alia on the assumption that increased economies of scale would generate savings. This paper empirically examines pre- and post-amalgamation (2006/07 and 2009/10) for scale economies. For the 2006/07 data, evidence of economies of scale was found for councils with populations up to 9…
Service Delivery Rules and the Distribution of Local Government Services
Bureaucratic Response to Citizen-Initiated Contacts
When citizens contact local government agencies, they generally attempt to influence service delivery decisions made by these bureaucracies. This paper examines the nature of citizen contacts, and the results of such contacts, with respect to the enforcement of environmental ordinances in Detroit, Michigan. We first examine the mechanisms responsible for the generation of citizen contacts. Assuming relations among citizen awareness, service need,…
A Cautionary Tale
Contemporary Australian public policy has come to rely increasingly on technical reports produced by commercial consultants in contrast to the traditional approach, which employed disinterested public servants to generate the specialist information required to inform decision makers. This approach is fraught with problems, not least the fact that ‘hired guns’ have strong incentives to create the ‘answers’ sought by their employers. By way of a ‘c…
Economies of Scale and Local Government Expenditure
Controversy surrounds structural reform in local government, especially efforts aimed at involuntarily reducing the number of local authorities to secure scale economies. We examined whether scale economies exist in local government outlays by analyzing the expenditure of 152 New South Wales councils. Initially, council expenditure is characterized by scale economies. However, given the correlation between population and population density, it is…
Subsidiarity
A common interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity in the federalism literature is that decentralized government, which is closer to the people, is better able to respond to the preferences of its citizens. However, when the principle is denuded of its moral foundations in this fashion it not only fails to provide the grounding for achieving human dignity and the common good, but may also become the harbinger of fiscal crises and social dys…
Multiple agents, blame games and public policy-making
Politicians often use 'independent experts' to avoid blame for contentious public policy. The use of multiple agents, however, has attracted relatively little attention. We extend the blame-avoidance literature to identify additional opportunities and risks that arise when multiple agents are used to support/oppose particular public policies. We then test our propositions using evidence from recent local government reforms in New South Wales. The…
Does Size Still Matter? An Empirical Analysis of the Effectiveness of Victorian Local Authorities
Efficiency approaches to the question of whether population size matters to optimal local government have proved largely inconclusive. However, recent exploratory empirical work employing an effectiveness approach – as proxied by citizen satisfaction survey data – offers a promising way forward. The present paper seeks to build upon an earlier cross-sectional analysis of Victorian local government by employing longitudinal data over a three-year …
Progressive and reactionary rhetoric in the municipal reform debate in New South Wales, Australia
Joseph Drewa, Bligh Granta* & Nicole Campbellaa Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
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 th…
No Aladdin’s Cave in New South Wales? Local Government Amalgamation, Scale Economies, and Data Envelopment Analysis Specification
Local government structural reform programs are often based on the purported benefits of increased scale. We examine this question in relation to the proposed amalgamation program for New South Wales (NSW) by the NSW Independent Local Government Review Panel using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We find evidence that a significant proportion of municipalities scheduled for amalgamation already exceed optimal scale and that the great majority of …
The Price of Democracy? Political Representation Structure and Per Capita Expenditure in Victorian Local Government
Local government systems across the world face acute and ongoing fiscal challenges. In Australia, the regulatory response has focused squarely on council consolidation. This has, unfortunately, meant that comparatively little attention has been paid to alternate, less disruptive methods for enhancing municipal sustainability. One such possibility lies in modifying the structure of local political representation. We conduct a number of estimations…
Can't Get No Satisfaction? The Association Between Community Satisfaction and Population Size for Victoria
Traditionally, the problem of determining the optimal size in local government has been empirically assessed by estimating the relationship between population size and the costs of services (usually measured in terms of per capita expenditure). These studies, however, have proved largely inconclusive. In comparison, an empirical analysis based on the relationship between the size of government and community satisfaction offers a potentially fruit…
Would Bigger Councils Yield Scale Economies in the Greater Perth Metropolitan Region? A Critique of the Metropolitan Local Government Review for Perth Local Government
Forced amalgamation is a ubiquitous feature of Australian local government reform – compulsory council consolidation programs have occurred in all states and territories, with the sole exception of Western Australia. However, the Final Report of the Metropolitan Local Government – released in October 2012 – called for a reduction of about 60 per cent of the local authorities in the Greater Perth metropolitan area. The Western Australian Governmen…
Rhetoric in municipal amalgamations
There is a large literature that seeks to evaluate municipal amalgamations ex post, but a relative dearth of scholarly inquiry into the practical political task of persuading the public to accept amalgamations ex ante. We address this important gap in the literature by conducting a rhetorical analysis to ascertain what types of arguments are believed to be efficacious for persuasion on amalgamation. We find evidence to suggest belief in the effic…
Municipal Mergers in New Zealand
Local government policymakers across the developed world have frequently employed municipal amalgamation to improve the operation of local councils, and New Zealand is no exception. This paper empirically examines claims made in Potential Costs and Savings of Local Government Reform in Hawke’s Bay that the merger of the five local authorities in the Hawke’s Bay Region of New Zealand would generate significant cost-savings. We empirically test for…
Less Haste, More Speed
In August 2011 the New South Wales (NSW) Government established the Independent Local Government Review Panel to examine the options for improving the sustainability of the NSW local government sector. In October 2014 the NSW Government set out its response in its Fit for the Future reform program. This paper provides a critical assessment of the Fit for the Future program. We show that it contains errors, relies on unreliable data, and neglects …
Can local government by lottery increase democratic responsiveness
In recent years, scholars have paid significant attention to the role of decentralisation in restraining government power and budgetary excess. Yet growth in taxation and debt in OECD countries suggests that such measures have often had a limited effect in taming ‘local Leviathans’. In response, this Research Provocation sets out a bold alternative vision, advocating the use of sortition – the deliberate introduction of arationality and chance in…
Do Municipal Mergers Improve Technical Efficiency? An Empirical Analysis of the 2008 Queensland Municipal Merger Program
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‐tempo…
Keeping It In‐House
Forced amalgamation has been used as a policy instrument in local government by numerous regulatory authorities across the world. A common presumption underlying municipal mergers holds that larger local councils will experience greater economies of scale. However, the empirical evidence on this question is mixed. Part of the reason for this could lie in the frequent use of population as a proxy for local government output in the empirical litera…
Manorial Accounts of St. Swithun's Priory, Winchester
Manorial Accounts of St. Swithun's Priory, Winchester Get access J. S. DREW J. S. DREW Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LXII, Issue CCXLII, January 1947, Pages 20–41, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LXII.CCXLII.20 Published: 01 January 1947
The temporal dependence of public policy evaluation
Amalgamation has been a cornerstone of many local government reform programmes internationally. However, there has been a lack of consensus in the academic literature surrounding the outcomes associated with amalgamation. One potential explanation for this is the difference in the length of time over which the evaluation takes place. In order to determine if the impacts of boundary reform are indeed temporally dependent on nature, we collected an…
Did amalgamation make local government more fit for the future
Local government amalgamations, mostly aimed at improving financial sustainability, remain a strongly contested public policy option. Proponents of amalgamation tend to emphasise the advantages of scale and plan around population size targets. By contrast, some scholars note the importance of understanding the needs and tastes of residents for local public services and stress the dangers of amalgamation dominated by population size considerations…
Successfully navigating the fiscal challenges of the age of the aged
Ageing populations have been identified as a looming fiscal threat to many developed nations across the world. However, in Japan, both the scale of the problem and the institutional context is such that it represents a rather desperate predicament. Within the next 25 years it is projected that over a quarter of Japan's local governments will have the majority of their population composed of senior citizens. This is problematic because as populati…
How losers can turn into winners in disputatious public policy
The study of heresthetic is a quest to explain how potential political losers might become winners. Local Government amalgamation is invariably a controversial and hotly contested political decision. It thus represents the ideal context to locate a pedagogical discussion regarding how clever herestheticians might act to bring about unlikely political success. Specifically, we extend the heresthetic literature by drawing attention to the costs (op…
Obituary Notices
The Mystery of Creation,'' Our Home in the Stars,' ' The Rival
Manorial Accounts of St. Swithun's Priory, Winchester
Manorial Accounts of St. Swithun's Priory, Winchester Get access J. S. DREW J. S. DREW Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LXII, Issue CCXLII, January 1947, Pages 20–41, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LXII.CCXLII.20 Published: 01 January 1947
Bureaucratic Response to Citizen-Initiated Contacts
When citizens contact local government agencies, they generally attempt to influence service delivery decisions made by these bureaucracies. This paper examines the nature of citizen contacts, and the results of such contacts, with respect to the enforcement of environmental ordinances in Detroit, Michigan. We first examine the mechanisms responsible for the generation of citizen contacts. Assuming relations among citizen awareness, service need,…
Service Delivery Rules and the Distribution of Local Government Services
On the Making of Americans
The Dynamics of Human Services Subcontracting
A Cautionary Tale
Contemporary Australian public policy has come to rely increasingly on technical reports produced by commercial consultants in contrast to the traditional approach, which employed disinterested public servants to generate the specialist information required to inform decision makers. This approach is fraught with problems, not least the fact that ‘hired guns’ have strong incentives to create the ‘answers’ sought by their employers. By way of a ‘c…
Keeping It In‐House
Forced amalgamation has been used as a policy instrument in local government by numerous regulatory authorities across the world. A common presumption underlying municipal mergers holds that larger local councils will experience greater economies of scale. However, the empirical evidence on this question is mixed. Part of the reason for this could lie in the frequent use of population as a proxy for local government output in the empirical litera…
Would Bigger Councils Yield Scale Economies in the Greater Perth Metropolitan Region? A Critique of the Metropolitan Local Government Review for Perth Local Government
Forced amalgamation is a ubiquitous feature of Australian local government reform – compulsory council consolidation programs have occurred in all states and territories, with the sole exception of Western Australia. However, the Final Report of the Metropolitan Local Government – released in October 2012 – called for a reduction of about 60 per cent of the local authorities in the Greater Perth metropolitan area. The Western Australian Governmen…
Economies of Scale and Local Government Expenditure
Controversy surrounds structural reform in local government, especially efforts aimed at involuntarily reducing the number of local authorities to secure scale economies. We examined whether scale economies exist in local government outlays by analyzing the expenditure of 152 New South Wales councils. Initially, council expenditure is characterized by scale economies. However, given the correlation between population and population density, it is…
Less Haste, More Speed
In August 2011 the New South Wales (NSW) Government established the Independent Local Government Review Panel to examine the options for improving the sustainability of the NSW local government sector. In October 2014 the NSW Government set out its response in its Fit for the Future reform program. This paper provides a critical assessment of the Fit for the Future program. We show that it contains errors, relies on unreliable data, and neglects …
How High Should They Jump? An Empirical Method for Setting Municipal Financial Ratio Performance Benchmarks
Heightened concerns regarding the financial sustainability of local councils have resulted in an increasing reliance by municipal regulators on financial ratio performance benchmarking. However, these benchmarks are often assigned without explicit justification and despite a paucity of empirical evidence. Furthermore, regulators typically allocate a single performance benchmark across an entire local government system despite the fact that indivi…
Can't Get No Satisfaction? The Association Between Community Satisfaction and Population Size for Victoria
Traditionally, the problem of determining the optimal size in local government has been empirically assessed by estimating the relationship between population size and the costs of services (usually measured in terms of per capita expenditure). These studies, however, have proved largely inconclusive. In comparison, an empirical analysis based on the relationship between the size of government and community satisfaction offers a potentially fruit…
Means, Motive, and Opportunity – Local Government Data Distortion in a High‐Stakes Environment
Regulatory authorities are increasingly relying upon performance data for developing public policy. However, this reliance necessarily assumes that the data are free from material distortion. This paper provides a conceptual framework for understanding the ‘means’, ‘motive’, and ‘opportunity’ for distorting data employed in high‐stakes performance‐management programmes. We present empirical evidence which suggests that the use of data drawn entir…
Does Size Still Matter? An Empirical Analysis of the Effectiveness of Victorian Local Authorities
Efficiency approaches to the question of whether population size matters to optimal local government have proved largely inconclusive. However, recent exploratory empirical work employing an effectiveness approach – as proxied by citizen satisfaction survey data – offers a promising way forward. The present paper seeks to build upon an earlier cross-sectional analysis of Victorian local government by employing longitudinal data over a three-year …
Municipal Mergers in New Zealand
Local government policymakers across the developed world have frequently employed municipal amalgamation to improve the operation of local councils, and New Zealand is no exception. This paper empirically examines claims made in Potential Costs and Savings of Local Government Reform in Hawke’s Bay that the merger of the five local authorities in the Hawke’s Bay Region of New Zealand would generate significant cost-savings. We empirically test for…
Did the Big Stick Work? An Empirical Assessment of Scale Economies and the Queensland Forced Amalgamation Program
In 2007, the Queensland Government imposed forced amalgamation with the number of local authorities falling from 157 to just 73 councils. Amalgamation was based inter alia on the assumption that increased economies of scale would generate savings. This paper empirically examines pre- and post-amalgamation (2006/07 and 2009/10) for scale economies. For the 2006/07 data, evidence of economies of scale was found for councils with populations up to 9…
What’s in a Name? Assessing the Performance of Local Government Classification Systems
Local government classification systems are employed in many countries for regulation, grant transfers and other public policy purposes. Given the pivotal role these classification systems play in public policy, their accuracy is a matter of some importance. Classification systems take several forms typically consisting of groupings of municipalities based on factors such as degree of urbanisation, population size and the like. However, to date n…
Progressive and reactionary rhetoric in the municipal reform debate in New South Wales, Australia
Joseph Drewa, Bligh Granta* & Nicole Campbellaa Institute for Public Policy and Governance, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Do Municipal Mergers Improve Technical Efficiency? An Empirical Analysis of the 2008 Queensland Municipal Merger Program
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‐tempo…
No Aladdin’s Cave in New South Wales? Local Government Amalgamation, Scale Economies, and Data Envelopment Analysis Specification
Local government structural reform programs are often based on the purported benefits of increased scale. We examine this question in relation to the proposed amalgamation program for New South Wales (NSW) by the NSW Independent Local Government Review Panel using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We find evidence that a significant proportion of municipalities scheduled for amalgamation already exceed optimal scale and that the great majority of …
The Price of Democracy? Political Representation Structure and Per Capita Expenditure in Victorian Local Government
Local government systems across the world face acute and ongoing fiscal challenges. In Australia, the regulatory response has focused squarely on council consolidation. This has, unfortunately, meant that comparatively little attention has been paid to alternate, less disruptive methods for enhancing municipal sustainability. One such possibility lies in modifying the structure of local political representation. We conduct a number of estimations…
Subsidiarity
A common interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity in the federalism literature is that decentralized government, which is closer to the people, is better able to respond to the preferences of its citizens. However, when the principle is denuded of its moral foundations in this fashion it not only fails to provide the grounding for achieving human dignity and the common good, but may also become the harbinger of fiscal crises and social dys…
Re-evaluating local government amalgamations
Public policy debates are often dominated by economic analysis of aggregate financial benefit. However, public policy formulated on this basis is frequently regarded as profoundly unsatisfactory by stakeholders. Focusing upon municipal amalgamation, this paper provides an alternative framework for public policy analysis which emphasises the importance of intent, process and uncertainty in decision making. We contend that an approach of this type …
Multiple agents, blame games and public policy-making
Politicians often use 'independent experts' to avoid blame for contentious public policy. The use of multiple agents, however, has attracted relatively little attention. We extend the blame-avoidance literature to identify additional opportunities and risks that arise when multiple agents are used to support/oppose particular public policies. We then test our propositions using evidence from recent local government reforms in New South Wales. The…
Political science (38 obras) · Economics (35 obras) · Public Administration (30 obras) · Public Administration (30 obras) · Government (linguistics (25 obras) · Local Government Finance and Decentralization (25 obras) · Local government (22 obras) · Public economics (21 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Sociology (20 obras)