Municipal amalgamations and their effects: a literature review

António F. Tavares

169 citations0/0 files storedMiscellanea Geographica

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Local Government Finance and Decentralization Local Governance and Planning Public Policy and Administration Research

Abstract

Abstract Municipal amalgamation reforms have been advocated as ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance capacity in local government service provision. Research on the consequences of amalgamations has reached maturity in terms of theories, research designs and methods, justifying a systematic survey of results. This article provides a synthesis of the empirical literature published over the last 20 years, organizing the effects of amalgamations into three categories: economic efficiency and cost savings, managerial implications, and democratic outcomes. Despite the significant variation across countries and reforms, some regularities emerge: cost savings being primarily limited to general administration expenditures (wages, office supplies, and so on), few changes in the quality of local services, and the diminished quality of local democracy. Several studies point to amalgamation reforms experiencing a trade-off between efficiency and democracy.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 169 citations exist upstream.

References

1956A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures 1999An Essay on Fiscal Federalism 1974Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality.1961The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry 1961The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry 1977Towards a tax constitution for Leviathan 2001Democracy in Suburbia 2011Jurisdiction Size and Local Democracy: Evidence on Internal Political Efficacy from Large-scale Municipal Reform

Cited by

2020The impact of municipal territorial reforms on the economic performance of local governments. A systematic review of quasi-experimental studies 2021From post-communist democratic laissez-faire to prevention of territorial fragmentation: tightening the rules of municipal splits in Central and Eastern Europe after 1990 2023“Top-down” local government mergers: Political and institutional factors facilitating radical amalgamation reforms 2024Re-organizing the service-delivery machine in a “post-NPM” era: a shopping-basket approach?2019Does variation in residents’ spatial mobility affect their preferences concerning local governance?

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.