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Local Public, Fiscal and Financial Governance pp 231–255Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Structural Reform: Municipal Mergers

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Abstract

Structural reorganization using municipal mergers is a common form of local government reform. This chapter examines both the theoretical literature and associated empirical work on council consolidation. After briefly discussing the magnitude of amalgamation across the world, this chapter considers the various schools of thought on council consolidation before examining specific dimensions of local government, including scale economies, scope economies, interjurisdictional spillovers, economic development, administrative and strategic capacity and local democracy. Given the various theoretical expectations of the impact of amalgamation, this chapter then considers available empirical evidence on scale and scope economies, interjurisdictional externalities, economic growth, administrative capacity as well as local democracy. This chapter ends by concluding that the weight of empirical evidence indicates that municipal mergers have not met anticipations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia

    Brian Dollery

  2. Department of Economics, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada

    Harry Kitchen

  3. University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Melville McMillan

  4. Governance Studies, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, USA

    Anwar Shah

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  1. Brian Dollery
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  2. Harry Kitchen
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  4. Anwar Shah
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Correspondence to Brian Dollery .

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Dollery, B., Kitchen, H., McMillan, M., Shah, A. (2020). Structural Reform: Municipal Mergers. In: Local Public, Fiscal and Financial Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36725-1_8

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