Local Public Service Provision and Delivery Economic Analysis and Policy Evaluation ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

[eng] This dissertation is composed of four empirical studies on local public service provision, production, and local politics. The first study, Chapter 2, looks at inter-municipal cooperation (IMC). IMC has attracted the interest of local authorities seeking to reform public service provision. Cost-saving, together with better quality and coordination, has been among the most important drivers of such cooperation. However, the empirical results on inter-municipal cooperation and its associated costs offer divergent outcomes. By conducting a meta-regression analysis, I seek to explain this discrepancy. I formulate several hypotheses regarding scale economies, transaction costs, and governance of cooperation. While I find no clear indications of the role played by transaction costs in the relationship between cooperation and service delivery costs, I find strong evidence that population size and governance are significant in explaining the relationship. Specifically, small populations and delegation to a higher tier of government seem to offer cost advantages to cooperating municipalities. As an extension of the model, I seek to disentangle service-related transaction costs based on asset specificity and ease of measurability of the service. In the next chapter, I analyze a far-reaching reform of solid waste collection in the city of Barcelona. In 2000, the city was divided into four zones, with four separate solid waste collection contracts being awarded to private firms, with none being allowed to obtain more than two zones, a rule that was revised in 2009 to just one contract per firm. This division of the market via exclusive territories sought to enhance competition in the expectation of the convergence of relative costs, efficiency, and service quality throughout the city. This chapter analyzes and evaluates the creation of lots as a tool of competition with monthly observations of costs and outputs between 2015 and 2019. The main findings are that firms producing in larger zones report higher costs, which ...