Is there a "zoo effect" in French local governments?

Quentin Frère (), Hakim Hammadou () and Sonia Paty

No 2011/1, INRA UMR CESAER Working Papers from INRA UMR CESAER, Centre d'’Economie et Sociologie appliquées à l'’Agriculture et aux Espaces Ruraux

Abstract: From the observation that many public goods ?such as zoos? are indivisible, OATES (1988) put forward the idea that the range of public goods should increase with localities? size; this is the "zoo effect". But despite this argument appears obvious, it suffers from a limited empirical literature. Therefore, the purpose of the present paper is to test this theoretical argument using data on French inter-municipalities, i.e. local governments that gather several municipalities together in order to manage some local goods. Depending on their spatial position, we split our data set into three groups: urban, suburban and rural inter-municipalities. Using spatial econometrics, estimation results provide evidence for the existence of a zoo effect in French inter-municipalities. In other terms, we find that the variety of services provided in larger inter-municipalities exceeds those in smaller communities. Moreover, the intensity of the zoo effect depends on the urban-rural gradient. It is less intense in the suburban and rural areas than in the urban communities.

Keywords: Local public services; Population size; Zoo effect; French juridictions; Intermunicipalities; spatial econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H4 H7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 2011-11-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-pbe and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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