Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public?s monitoring ability. Still, although extensive voter involvement may put...

Economic efficiency – understood in terms of jurisdictions providing a maximum amount of output for a given level of inputs – is one potential means to evaluate public policies. Various approaches, however, co-exist to measure the (technical) efficiency of organizations. Given that these...

German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments’ vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of...