Download or read book Consolidating Developmental Local Government written by Mirjam Van Donk and published by Juta and Company Ltd. This book was released on 2008 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the dynamics of local government transformation and captures the key themes of the debates about policy options, lessons and key strategic decisions. This text is suitable for government officials, students, researchers, specialists, community leaders, businesses and the general reader.
Download or read book Consolidating Developmental Local Government written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book City County Consolidation and Its Alternatives Reshaping the Local Government Landscape written by J.B. Carr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City-country consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations for pursuing consolidation and the way the rules guiding the process shape the outcome. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, inter-local agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectives for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.
Download or read book Local Government Consolidation in the United States written by Dagney Gail Faulk and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two issues related to the structure of local government: the determinants of consolidation and the potential impact of consolidation on local government spending. This is a narrow undertaking and leaves important elements of local government reform for future analysis. The study's primary foci are examining the factors that influence city-county consolidation, considering the impact of city-county consolidation on local government spending, and estimating the potential savings that could result from the scale economies and efficiency gains from consolidating local government units. While other regions of the United States are considered in this study, but the analysis focuses primarily on the Midwest where population declines and changes in the employment base and state policies (such as property tax caps in Indiana) have had dramatic effects on the fiscal viability of local governments. The current economic climate, along with policy changes related to property tax restructuring in many states, has led to substantial reductions in local governments' budgets. As a result, many local governments are in crisis and are considering some level of consolidation. Statistical methods and data on consolidation referendum attempts in the United States since 1970 are used to test whether governments that have consolidated (i.e., voters approved the consolidation referendum) had higher spending prior to their consolidation (as measured by local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures) compared to the average local government in the state. The effects of city-county consolidation are explored; using consolidation referendum data, the impact of consolidation on local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures is examined. The influence of consolidation on economic development is also investigated with some interesting results. The study also used two methods to estimate the savings from government consolidation and presents aggregate models to examine the potential savings from economies of scale and efficiency improvements. The book also helpfully provides a helpful discussion of the economies of scale and efficiency for several functional areas, including police and fire protection, sewerage, solid waste, public welfare, administration, health, education, and libraries. This book will be an essential resource for political scientists and policy makers interested in American government. Written in a highly accessible manner, it will also be a valuable read for students and general readers.
Download or read book Case Studies of City County Consolidation written by Suzanne M. Leland and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2004-07-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Facing cutbacks in federal and state assistance and a new wave of taxpayer revolts, local governments have renewed interest in local government consolidation as a way of achieving efficiencies of scale in response to citizen demands for services. Yet the vast majority of consolidation efforts fail, either during the process of drafting a charter or once they reach the ballot - only five have passed since 1990; only thirty-two have been successfully implemented since the first, when the city of New Orleans merged with Orleans Parish in 1805. What accounts for the high failure rate and what factors led to successful consolidations? This volume presents thirteen comparable case studies of consolidation campaigns and distills the findings.
Download or read book City County Consolidation written by Suzanne M. Leland and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although a frequently discussed reform, campaigns to merge a major municipality and county to form a unified government fail to win voter approval eighty per cent of the time. One cause for the low success rate may be that little systematic analysis of consolidated governments has been done. In City–County Consolidation, Suzanne Leland and Kurt Thurmaier compare nine city–county consolidations—incorporating data from 10 years before and after each consolidation—to similar cities and counties that did not consolidate. Their groundbreaking study offers valuable insight into whether consolidation meets those promises made to voters to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these governments. The book will appeal to those with an interest in urban affairs, economic development, local government management, general public administration, and scholars of policy, political science, sociology, and geography.
Download or read book Government Consolidation and Economic Development in Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh written by Rae W. Archibald and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2008 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report seeks to contribute to understanding the effect of consolidation on future economic development, which is especially critical as Pittsburgh and Allegheny County consider again how their two governments might act to better meet the needs of the region."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Local Government Consolidation in the United States written by Dagney Gail Faulk and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two issues related to the structure of local government: the determinants of consolidation and the potential impact of consolidation on local government spending. This is a narrow undertaking and leaves important elements of local government reform for future analysis. The study's primary foci are examining the factors that influence city-county consolidation, considering the impact of city-county consolidation on local government spending, and estimating the potential savings that could result from the scale economies and efficiency gains from consolidating local government units. While other regions of the United States are considered in this study, but the analysis focuses primarily on the Midwest where population declines and changes in the employment base and state policies (such as property tax caps in Indiana) have had dramatic effects on the fiscal viability of local governments. The current economic climate, along with policy changes related to property tax restructuring in many states, has led to substantial reductions in local governments' budgets. As a result, many local governments are in crisis and are considering some level of consolidation. Statistical methods and data on consolidation referendum attempts in the United States since 1970 are used to test whether governments that have consolidated (i.e., voters approved the consolidation referendum) had higher spending prior to their consolidation (as measured by local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures) compared to the average local government in the state. The effects of city-county consolidation are explored; using consolidation referendum data, the impact of consolidation on local government employment rates, payrolls, and expenditures is examined. The influence of consolidation on economic development is also investigated with some interesting results. The study also used two methods to estimate the savings from government consolidation and presents aggregate models to examine the potential savings from economies of scale and efficiency improvements. The book also helpfully provides a helpful discussion of the economies of scale and efficiency for several functional areas, including police and fire protection, sewerage, solid waste, public welfare, administration, health, education, and libraries. This book will be an essential resource for political scientists and policy makers interested in American government. Written in a highly accessible manner, it will also be a valuable read for students and general readers.
Download or read book Developmental Local Government and Local Economic Development written by Firoz Khan and published by . This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Developmental Local Government written by Jaap De Visser and published by Intersentia nv. This book was released on 2005 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns the role of the state in achieving development. In many developing countries conventional wisdom concluded that development is best achieved through a centralised development strategy. The failure of this centralised development strategy has brought about the emergence of decentralisation to local government as one of the means to turn the tide of underdevelopment. This book presents decentralisation not only as a manifestation of 'good governance', but also as an indispensable tool towards development. The central question, however, is the following: how should the transitional state convert this into constitutional and legal arrangements? The author proposes a model for capturing the developmental role of local government in institutional arrangements. The new design for local government, put forward in South Africas 1997 Constitution, is based on the notion that local government should be the epicentre of development. This has prompted the author to use this South African concept as well as the first experiences with the implementation of the new local government dispensation as a case study.The importance of the book thus lies in the fact that it produces an institutional model for developmental local government that is not only based on development and decentralisation theories but is also tested in practice. It is hoped that those with an interest in the role of the state in development will find the arguments and conclusions useful. The book also provides a comprehensive overview of the South African design for local government, which is of interest to lawyers, policy makers and other parties involved in the implementation of the South African decentralisation strategy. Jaap de Visser teaches public law at the Law Faculty of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Until the end of 2002, he worked as a researcher for the Community Law Centre (University of the Western Cape), specialising in local government law.
Download or read book Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries written by Pranab Bardhan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-06-16 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction in the authority of national governments over economic policy. The contributors to Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries examine this institutional transformation from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, offering detailed case studies of decentralization in eight countries: Bolivia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda. Some of these countries witnessed an unprecedented "big bang" shift toward comprehensive political and economic decentralization: Bolivia in 1995 and Indonesia after the fall of Suharto in 1998. Brazil and India decentralized in an uneven and more gradual manner. In some other countries (such as Pakistan), devolution represented an instrument for consolidation of power of a nondemocratic national government. In China, local governments were granted much economic but little political power. South Africa made the transition from the undemocratic decentralization of apartheid to decentralization under a democratic constitution. The studies provide a comparative perspective on the political and economic context within which decentralization took place, and how this shaped its design and possible impact. Contributors Omar Azfar, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Pranab Bardhan, Shubham Chaudhuri, Ali Cheema, Jean-Paul Faguet, Bert Hofman, Kai Kaiser, Philip E. Keefer, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Justin Yifu Lin, Mingxing Liu, Jeffrey Livingston, Patrick Meagher, Dilip Mookherjee, Ambar Narayan, Adnan Qadir, Ran Tao, Tara Vishwanath, Martin Wittenberg
Download or read book Local Governance in Developing Countries written by Anwar Shah and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2006 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new institutional economics perspective on alternative models of local governance, offering a comprehensive view of local government organization and finance in the developing world. The experiences of ten developing/transition economies are reviewed to draw lessons of general interest in strengthening responsive, responsible, and accountable local governance. The book is written in simple user friendly language to facilitate a wider readership by policy makers and practitioners in addition to students and scholars of public finance, economics and politics.
Download or read book Consolidation Or Fragmentation written by Paweł Swianiewicz and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the optimal size of a local government unit? 'Consolidation or Fragmentation? The Size of Local governments in Central and Eastern Europe' addresses this policy relevant question in relation to the emerging democracies of the region.
Download or read book Local Government Local Governance and Sustainable Development written by Doreen Atkinson and published by HSRC Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the transformation of South Africa's apartheid local government system into a development-oriented system of municipal governance, requiring, however, continuing short and long-term interventions on the part of both the central and provincial governments if it is to deliver its desired outputs.
Download or read book Mega Projects written by Alan A. Altshuler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004-05-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brookings Institution Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy publication Since the demise of urban renewal in the early 1970s, the politics of large-scale public investment in and around major American cities has received little scholarly attention. In Mega-Projects, Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff analyze the unprecedented wave of large-scale (mega-) public investments that occurred in American cities during the 1950s and 1960s; the social upheavals they triggered, which derailed large numbers of projects during the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the political impulses that have shaped a new generation of urban mega-projects in the decades since. They also appraise the most important consequences of policy shifts over this half-century and draw out common themes from the rich variety of programmatic and project developments that they chronicle. The authors integrate narratives of national as well as state and local policymaking, and of mobilization by (mainly local) project advocates, with a profound examination of how well leading theories of urban politics explain the observed realities. The specific cases they analyze include a wide mix of transportation and downtown revitalization projects, drawn from numerous regions—most notably Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Portland, and Seattle. While their original research focuses on highway, airport, and rail transit programs and projects, they draw as well on the work of others to analyze the politics of public investment in urban renewal, downtown retailing, convention centers, and professional sports facilities. In comparing their findings with leading theories of urban and American politics, Altshuler and Luberoff arrive at some surprising findings about which perform best and also reveal some important gaps in the literature as a whole. In a concluding chapter, they examine the potential effects of new fiscal pressures, business mobilization to relax environmental constraints, and security concerns in the wake of September 11. And they make clear their own views about how best to achieve a balance between developmental, environmental, and democratic values in public investment decisionmaking. Integrating fifty years of urban development history with leading theories of urban and American politics, Mega-Projects provides significant new insights into urban and intergovernmental politics.
Download or read book Local Governance in Africa written by Dele Olowu and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of why some decentralization reforms have led to viable systems of local governance in Africa, while others have failed. It outlines the key issues involved, provides historical context, and identifies the factors that have encouraged or discouraged success.
Download or read book Government Consolidation and Economic Development in Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh written by Rae W. Archibald and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report concludes that, although evidence is mixed and effects difficult to measure, consolidating the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County could enhance economic development by unifying leadership, improving policy direction and coordination, and sharpening economic-development initiatives. Increased collaboration with the private sector also is important, and combining only two governments still leaves the region highly fragmented.
