The paper analyzes local political cycle in Czech municipalities over the period between 1997 and 2013. We apply the system and the difference GMM estimators to detect electoral manipulation in current and capital expenditures in electoral and pre-electoral years. Primarily, we estimate the...

There is an extensive literature on the impact of nonrenewable natural resources (NNR) in the fiscal performance of countries. Overall, with few exceptions, the studies suggest an inverse relationship between these two variables. According to the IDB (2013), the presence of NNR can lead to the...

In this article, we quantitatively analyze changes in the size distribution of municipal jurisdictions in Japan by using their rank-size distribution to capture the change. In Japan, the central government sometimes enacts large-scale municipal mergers, aimed at the creating of municipalities of...

The paper is devoted to problems of ensuring balanced and sustainable development of a very specific and important metropolitan region of the Russian Federation - the region of St Petersburg and surrounding it Leningrad Oblast. St.Petersburg (City) and Leningrad Oblast (Region) are both...

This study aims at analyzing the impacts of administrative problems resulting from the two level form of urban government whose framework is outlined in the Law for Metropolitan Municipalities, over the notion of integrated planning. It is suggested that it would be impossible to mention a...

We analyse free-riding behaviour of Finnish municipalities prior to voluntary municipal mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, because of a delay from the initial decision to the actual merger during which municipalities stay autonomous. Using a...

Empirical evidence on economies of scale in healthcare is mostly based on the cost effects of hospital mergers. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper approaches the economies of scale issue by analysing the break-ups of municipal health centre federations. We use the...

This paper explores the role of Croatian large cities in financing local development projects. Croatian cities have limited autonomy in realization of public revenue. There are a small number of fiscal instruments to which cities can fully leverage or at least under the statutory limits can...