Wieviel Verwaltung benötigt der Bürger?

Tony Mudrack ()

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, 2015, vol. 35, issue 2, 240 pages

Abstract: An important element for measuring the efficiency of public administration is the demand for the number of staff. There are different economic methods to measure the demand. Typically, the determinations are based on the per capita staff. However, the scientific literature documents the insufficiency of per capita based determinations. This paper presents more necessary aspects for measuring the efficiency of public administrations. Besides the measuring of efficiency, the German financial equalization systems also consider differences by the per capita administration staff and deduce additional financial demand. So the German financial equalization systems integrates these additional financial demand by ‘upgrading’ the local population and increases the financial compensation in these upgraded regions. However, the existence and specific amount of the additional demands are discussed very controversially. The German Federal Constitutional Court authorizes the additional financial demand only for duty tasks of public expenditures. Therefore, in the municipal administration there is a need to differentiate between the total number of staff and the number of staff in core administration. The core administration operates only duty tasks of the municipality. Nevertheless, there are a lot of difficulties for interregional comparisons between the German States caused by a missing definition for the core administration. This paper eliminates this deficit by an analysis of 184 municipal staff appointment schemes and selects the core administration for these municipalities. The empirical estimations present highly significant influence of the settlement structure and other determinants for the per capita number of staff and the per capita staff expenditures. Inter alia overhead costs are noticed which cause temporary additional financial demands. A recognition of these additional financial demands in the public administration are still missed in the German financial equalization system and the measuring of efficiency. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Öffentliche Finanzen; Interregionale Unterschiede; Öffentliche Personalausgaben; Deutscher Fiskalföderalismus; Deutsche Finanzausgleichssysteme; H11; H31; H72; H73; H76; H77; Public Finances; Interjurisdictional Differentials; Public Staff Expenditures; German Fiscal Federalism; German Financial Equalization System (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10037-014-0093-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jahrfr:v:35:y:2015:i:2:p:211-240

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10037

DOI: 10.1007/s10037-014-0093-1

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft is currently edited by Thomas Brenner and Georg Hirte

More articles in Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft from Springer, Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().