Pourquoi transférer des actions d’aide sociale facultative au niveau supra-communal ?

This paper models the decision made by supra-municipal government (EPCI) of adopting extralegal welfare actions in place of municipalities. Implementing local welfare actions at this upper level can indeed have consequences in electoral and demographic terms whereas it generates very few economies of scale. We depart from the idea that a community finally has low interest in accepting the transfer of this kind of social competencies. We use the Klier and McMillen (2008) generalized method of moments that suits our cross, spatial and binary data. We show that the transfer of these competences is driven by two categories of explanations. One is based on the presence of phenomenon of mimicry between EPCIs which is probably related to the mobility of individuals between supra-municipal communities. The second explanation highlights the fact that the mobility of individuals within EPCI put pressure on EPCIs to adopt such social competencies.