IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ete/leerwp/657314.html

Local government size and service level provision. Evidence from conditional non-parametric analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Giovanna D'Inverno
  • Wim Moesen
  • Kristof De Witte

Abstract

Although the local provision of public goods accommodates better to the heterogeneous local preferences and mitigates the fiscal illusion problem, it comes at the cost of potential diseconomies of scale. This paper examines the relationship between municipal size and local service level provision by applying state-of-the-art non-parametric techniques to a unique panel dataset of Flemish data. We measure the service provision level by using an innovative robust conditional ‘Benefit of the Doubt’ model and we estimate its efficiency in relationship with the local expenditures by means of a robust conditional Data Envelopment Analysis model. Overall, the main findings suggest the presence of diseconomies of scale, and provide weak evidence on an optimal size of local public good provision of around 10,000 citizens.

Suggested Citation

  • Giovanna D'Inverno & Wim Moesen & Kristof De Witte, 2020. "Local government size and service level provision. Evidence from conditional non-parametric analysis," Working Papers of LEER - Leuven Economics of Education Research 657314, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), LEER - Leuven Economics of Education Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:ete:leerwp:657314
    Note: paper number DPS 20.12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/f52ade01-6318-46b0-822b-6b504d88ef06
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Iliopoulos, Panagiotis & De Witte, Kristof, 2024. "The expenditure composition and trade-offs in local government budgets," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    3. Gissur Ó Erlingsson & Jonas Klarin & Eva Mörk, 2024. "Does size matter? Evidence from municipal splits," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 64(3), pages 700-731, June.
    4. Guo, Wen & Yang, Bo & Ji, Jiong & Liu, Xiaorui, 2023. "Abundance of natural resources, government scale and green economic growth: An empirical study on urban resource curse," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 87(PA).
    5. Compagnucci, Fabiano & Morettini, Gabriele, 2024. "Inner areas matter: A place-sensitive approach for the identification of the Daily Life Spaces in the Italian Abruzzo region," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ete:leerwp:657314. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: library EBIB (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://feb.kuleuven.be/drc/LEER .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.