Municipal corporatization in Germany and Italy

Abstract

During the last few years, the local government sector in European countries has undergone a number of important changes. Among the various reform initiatives has been the externalization of public services, such as corporatization, contracting-out, public–private partnerships and privatization. The key goal of this article is to describe and explain the evolution of local public services provision in the two selected countries, with a particular focus on ‘corporatization’. The article seeks to draw a picture of the actual municipal landscape with the administrative core and its various corporations. Furthermore, it will discuss the reasons for corporatization trends and their impact on the corporate governance structures of municipalities in Germany and Italy.     

Municipal costs and urban area

There are plausible reasons for believing that municipal service system costs will increase with urban “sprawl.” The costs of several municipal systems were thus analyzed, namely: water; sewage; roads and highways (capital outlays only); police, fire, and park systems; electricity distribution; gas distribution; and telephone service. The statistical relation between urban area and urban costs was weaker than a priori beliefs might suggest. Capital outlays for public municipal systems increase only about 1.6% for every 10% increment in land area. Public municipal operating costs, and the capital and operating costs of private utility systems are practically unaffected by urban area.     

Women and risk-taking behaviour in local public finance

This study examines how female representation in local elected (mayor and legislature) and administrative (mid-level manager) positions influences municipal financial decision-making in 764 Japanese city-level governments. Findings show that female representation in local councils is positively correlated with risk-averse behaviour in financial decisions, as female representation on the legislature is negatively associated with issuing municipal bonds and with local investment in public corporations. Female representation in executive (mayor and vice-mayor) and mid-level administrative managerial positions has no apparent effects on local financial decisions. This study tests existing explanations of relationships between female managerial representation and fiscal behaviour in an Asian developed setting characterized by considerable underrepresentation of women in politics.     

Do professional associations make a difference?: linking municipal managers’ association participation and attitudes toward citizen participation

ABSTRACT

There has been a lingering debate on the relationship between public managers’ professional socialization and their acceptance of citizen participation. In this paper, it is empirically confirmed that association participation strengthens municipal managers’ predispositions toward engaging citizens. It is found that municipal managers that are active in generalist-oriented professional associations will be more likely to realize successful practices for citizen engagement in peer municipalities, which boosts their perceived sense of citizen contribution, and reduces their perceptions on the costliness of engaging citizens. These relationships are found to be mediated by municipal managers’ technocratic orientation and engagement self-efficacy.     

Contracting-out at local government level

Abstract

Contracting-out is a public sector reform tool, and it is used as a specific form of privatization. Because of its multi-dimensional character, it does not always lead to positive improvements, even in developed countries, and its impact in countries in Central and Eastern Europe may be limited. This issue is discussed in the theoretical part of this paper. Its analytical part investigates selected important dimensions of contracting-out for local public services in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, namely forms of delivery, decision-making processes concerning the selection of the form of delivery and of supplier, and costs comparisons. The final part provides a brief list of possible tools to improve the current negative situation.     

Plant Closings and the Community

A bstract . Over the last 10 years, 10 million jobs have been lost and millions of dollars in capital rendered unproductive from plant closings in New England and the Upper Midwest. Some were weeded out by the discipline of the market but most were moving to cut labor costs and claim subsidies from governments seeking to expand local job opportunities. And some were using the threat of closing to exact concessions from labor and government. In some cases it is possible for municipal governments to buy or condemn the plant and operate it as a public enterprise ; municipal operation is often more efficient and productive. Municipally owned and operated public enterprise should command serious consideration, as an option like cooperative ownership.     

Drivers of exploitative and explorative innovation in a collaborative public-sector context

ABSTRACT

This paper studies multilevel networks, in which municipalities collaborate with higher tiers of government (upward collaboration), with peers (outward) and with local stakeholders (inward) to discover innovative ways to create public value. A set of hypotheses was developed on the effects of three forms of collaboration (i.e. inward, outward and upward) on two types of innovation (i.e. exploitative and explorative innovation). A range of network and municipality characteristics was also considered. The model was tested by capturing the perceptions of 656 municipal representatives. The research findings provide evidence of complex links between forms of collaboration and types of innovation.     

Organizational complexity and participatory innovation: participatory budgeting in local government

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examined the relationship between organizational complexity and the adoption of participatory innovation in German municipal government. We proposed that organizations with more complex organizational structures are more likely to adopt participatory innovation. We investigated municipalities (N = 394) of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and used participatory budgeting as an indicator for innovation. Our results indicate that organizational complexity expressed by functional differentiation has a positive relationship with the occurrence of participatory innovation. The results inform a debate about the value trade-offs that are inherent to the structural design of public organizations.     

Regional Market Potential and the Number and Size of Firms: Observations and Evidence from Chile

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between market potential and the spatial variation in the number and the average size of firms. We adapt the canonical model of the New Economic Geography to demonstrate this relationship and to derive an empirical specification suitable for estimation through dynamic panel techniques. The model is tested against municipal data on the number of firms per adult in Chilean comunas for 2005–2010. Our results confirm that market potential along with place-specific fixed costs play an important role in determining the spatial variation in the number of firms per capita.     

Coping with functional collective action dilemma: functional fragmentation and administrative integration

ABSTRACT

Functional fragmentation among city departments has been a critical public administration problem in practice and theory. This paper investigates the political and administrative motivations for the reform from functionally fragmented water governance model towards an integrative agency design. Drawing on the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework and the literature on bureaucratic structures, we hypothesize that cities’ decisions for administrative reform are influenced by different types of transactions costs incurred in the negotiation process among local agencies. Empirical results of this study provide strong support for the transaction cost hypotheses on the roles of bargaining cost, enforcement cost, and information cost.     

Birth of the Modern Corporation: From Servant of the State to Semi‐Sovereign Power

It is widely known that large business corporations have accumulated enormous political and economic power since the early 20^th century. They not only create barriers to entry to small firms in the economic domain, they also pose a serious threat to democracy by dominating public discourse and occupying a wide range of public spaces. Efforts to halt or reverse the growth of corporate power have been largely ineffective, in large part because they have been entirely reactive. In order for citizens to reclaim the economy and politics, a new strategy is necessary, one that starts by analyzing the source of corporate power. The method of analysis in this article is historical, specifically the history of changes in the United States of the legal instruments of incorporation and their relationship to emerging conditions in the economy and business. In the first half of the 19^th century, corporations were chartered by state governments to carry out public benefit activities, particularly infrastructure projects. These mixed corporations lost favor during the depression of the 1840s and were replaced by private for‐profit corporations that continued using the same debt financing instruments employed by states. They were also still regulated by the states that issued their charters. When corporations sought to avoid competition by creating cartels, they had difficulty maintaining discipline and discovered they needed new rights in order to gain permanent control of markets. In the 1890s, they were granted the status of “natural persons,” with the legal protections of citizens, but they also gained the right to buy other corporations, thereby solidifying their market power and making them largely autonomous from public control. Each transition was contested, but when it was completed, it seemed to the public as if corporations had always had their new powers. In order to regain the power to hold corporations accountable to the public, those old contested issues need to be brought back into public discourse, so that citizens might decide for themselves how much power corporations should have.     

The Neoliberalization of Municipal Land Policy in Sweden

In Sweden, local governments’ practice of the ‘municipal land instrument’—that is, the use of public land ownership as a tool for facilitating urban development—has a long tradition. In the post‐war era, public land ownership constituted an important component of state‐led housing production, which had both a productive and a redistributive purpose. Departing from a political economy perspective, this article demonstrates how the redistributive aspect of the municipal land instrument has been dissolved under neoliberalization, and discusses why the use of this instrument is problematic from both a democratic and ethical point of view. Based on a case study in Helsingborg, the article argues that, in using public land to leverage private investment in urban development, local decision makers adopt an interest in supporting rent extraction from tenants and housing owners, while subsidizing investment costs for developers. The dual role that municipalities assume as landowner‐developers and planning authorities enable them to facilitate urban development effectively, but it is also problematic because it transgresses the public–private law divide inherent to Swedish law. Assuming this dual role, municipalities place themselves in a biased position that risks undermining the legitimacy of governmental actions in general, and the planning system in particular.     

Socio-Cultural Values and Organizational Culture

SUMMARY

This exploratory study examines if certain dimensions of the socio-cultural values could explain certain types of organizational culture. The proposition merits investigation because it has important implications for local as well as international and global companies. The study first investigates employees' perceptions of the existing and preferred cultural orientations in four Jordanian organizations, and then it compares the results with other studies conducted in other cultures (American and South African). In Jordan data were collected by means of Harrison and Stokes survey for diagnosing organizational culture, the same instrument used in the USA and in South Africa. The study concludes by suggesting that in certain countries the national culture's effects may appear in a particular dominant organizational culture, that is desired by the management, but not actually preferred by employees. This implies that it is more beneficial for international and transnational corporations to develop “strong” cultures rather than to encourage local units to adapt to their national cultures.     

Bonding and Bridging Associational Social Capital and the Financial Performance of Local Authorities in Israel

Abstract

This study explores whether bridging and bonding social capital differ in their impacts on government performance at the local level and the extent to which these impacts vary between localities exhibiting differing socioeconomic resources. The study is based on an analysis of 256 local authorities in Israel. The findings show that bridging and bonding social capital do differ in their respective effects on government performance and that the nature of the relationship of each type of capital with government performance varies by the community's socioeconomic profile. Poor communities with high densities of bridging social capital were characterized by lower deficits as a percentage of total municipal budgets, more accurate expenditure forecasts and greater spending on services per capita.     

指数关联债券——城市公租房建设融资的途径探索

《十二五规划纲要》中提出的五年内建设3600万套保障性住房至少需要投资4万亿元,其中绝大部分需要地方政府融资.针对其中公租房存在的融资瓶颈,本文分析了发行市政债券的必要性,提出发行一种创新型产品——指数关联债券(Index Linked Bond),以促进地方政府的信用建设,改善融资环境.另外,本文量化分析了公租房的造...     

New Public Management and Citizens' Perceptions of Local Service Efficiency,Responsiveness, Equity and Effectiveness

Abstract

We examine the relationship between a range of new public management (NPM) practices and citizens' perceptions of service efficiency, responsiveness, equity and effectiveness in English local governments. We find that public–private relationships have a negative relationship with citizens' perceptions of all four dimensions of local service performance, but an entrepreneurial strategic orientation exhibits a positive association with all four. Performance management is also likely to positively influence rather than negatively influencing citizens' perceptions of local public services. Further analysis revealed that the impact of NPM practices varies according to the level of socio-economic disadvantage confronted by local governments.     

Entrepreneurship at the Local Government Level: Stimulating and restraining forces in the Swedish waste management industry

Abstract

This article explores influential forces on public sector entrepreneurship in two different organizational forms: the local government administration and the local government corporation. In arguing for the need to consider the context of organizational form, this article presents a development beyond existing research on public entrepreneurship (PE) which so far has been conducted only to a limited extent. The inductive analysis identifies factors not previously perceived as influential on PE. These findings support the importance of distinguishing between organizational forms. Finally, the findings can be used for formulating hypotheses possible to test in larger research designs.     

When Public–Private Partnerships Fail

Abstract

This article explores the dynamic and the results of efforts by citizens to resist the costs passed onto them by public–private partnerships for infrastructure, through examining citizen engagement in two problematic projects in Taiwan and China. In both cases, the design and procurement phase focused on the government–investor relation, with no obvious opportunity for citizen voice and costs were displaced onto users. In the operational phase, citizen protest (voice) was more effective in resisting costs in Taiwan where the institutional environment was more open and responsive; in the China case, availability of alternative roads (choice) was crucial in resisting costs.     

Tensions in local government employment relationships

Abstract

A wide variety of initiatives characterized under the umbrella term of new public management have been introduced over the past two decades to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the public sector. The implications of these initiatives for public sector employment relationships have been the subject of on-going debate. This article contributes to this debate through examining how employees within local authorities are managed in a time of personal crisis with a particular focus on long-term sickness absence in the context of increased management drives for efficiency under the NPM agenda. The findings reveal that for managers in two local authorities that form the focus of this study there is a tension in struggling to achieve a workable balance between the needs of employees and wider operational requirements, resulting in role ambiguity for line managers and detrimental effects for vulnerable public service workers.     

Weakening the glass ceiling: does organizational growth reduce gender segregation in the upper tiers of Danish local government?

ABSTRACT

The theory of representative bureaucracy highlights gender segregation in the public sector and its detrimental implications for public policy outcomes. Focusing attention on organisational responses to this protracted problem, we supply evidence on whether organizational growth provides potential for change in the upper echelons of the public sector. An evaluation of the relationship between new hires and gender representation within the management tiers of Danish local government reveals an association between the recruitment of additional employees and improved gender integration. This is particularly pronounced for public organizations that employ fewer women. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.