ON THE SIZE OF LOCAL JURISDICTIONS

Bruno Bises and Agnese Sacchi ()

No 409, Working Papers from CREI Università degli Studi Roma Tre

Abstract: This paper aims at analysing the population size of local jurisdictions with respect to the characteristics of the goods they provide to their citizens. The economic analysis on the size of government units is mainly founded on the classical fiscal federalism literature (Tiebout, 1956; Buchanan, 1965; Olson, 1969; Oates, 1972) and on the more recent stream on the breaking-up of nations (Alesina and Spolaore, 1997; Bolton and Roland, 1997; Spolaore, 2005). We propose a theoretical framework to further develop the analyses accomplished in the mentioned studies. In particular, we build a model that takes into account the possibly different characteristics of local public expenditures, in terms of both the mix of cash and inkind components and the degree of "rivalness" of the goods and services supplied by local governments. We show that these factors may influence the optimal size of local units. Some conclusions about which level of government should perform any specific mix of public functions, in order to maximize individuals' welfare, are also drawn.

Keywords: local size; rival and non-rival public goods; cash and in-kind expendit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009, Revised 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://host.uniroma3.it/centri/crei/pubblicazioni/ ... 009/CREI_04_2009.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rcr:wpaper:04_09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from CREI Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Francesca Vaino ().