지방자치단체의 통합과 재정효율성

Abstract

Some previous studies have found the existence of the economy of scale in providing local public goods which means that per capita expenditures of a local government become lower as its population size become larger and suggested that the consolidation of local governments is recommended. In this paper we explore the cost-saving effects of city-county consolidation in 39 cities which consolidated in 1995. The costs are categorized as labor costs, costs of goods and services, sum of them, etc. In every categorized costs, the consolidated cities showed the almost same trends of per capita costs with various comparison groups similar in population size. This means that the city-county consolidation was not effective to save the production costs of the local public goods and suggests that we need additional precise measures as well as a consolidation itself in order to save the costs.