Quality of government and economic growth at the municipal level: Evidence from Spain
This paper analyzes the relationship between quality of government and economic growth at the municipal level in 1,820 Spanish municipalities during the period 2008–2015. At this level of dis- aggregation, the literature is virtually non-existent due to severe data constraints. To address this limitation, we proxy institutional quality with a measure of local government efficiency, which provides an accurate indicator of how good local authorities are at managing their budgets. This variable is expected to be highly correlated with other more traditional quality of government indicators such as corruption. After computing our measure, we then use it in a growth regression framework. We find…
Explaining local governments' cost efficiency: Controllable and uncontrollable factors
Abstract Efficient and effective management of public resources is essential at all levels of government. This issue has gained momentum due to the strains that affected public sector finances after the onset of the 2007/08 crisis in many countries, particularly in Europe. In this article, we evaluate the influence of environmental variables that affect local government efficiency in one European country, Spain, during the crisis years (2009–2015). To this end, and considering the possible influence of both controllable and uncontrollable factors, we use an approach that is able to analyse their impact across the conditional distribution of performance, and which controls for the (likely) e…