The local state and urban local government in Zambia

It is argued, with reference to urban local government in Zambia, particularly in Lusaka, that recent debates on the form and functions of the national state in Africa may be used to illuminate the working of the urban local state. Available evidence on the class interests represented in the urban local state is reviewed, and these interests and their actions with respect to personal accumulation and political clientelism are found to be similar to those found at the national level. The urban local state in Zambia performs functions similar to those which have been revealed by analyses of other countries, although the nature of these functions, and the extent to which they are successfully performed, is influenced by the political and economic context, the institutional framework and especially the constraints imposed by central government on local autonomy. The changes proposed in the 1980 Local Administration Act are outlined, and a preliminary assessment made of the extent to which they are likely to change the form and functions of the urban local state.     

Sustainable local democracy

To identify what is needed to sustain local democracy we need a model of democratic government and an idea of the kind of social and economic context that is supportive of democracy. Local democracy requires a combination of a liberal democratic model of local government and the prerequisites of democratic stability: economic development, equality, political culture and the development of civil society. However, a number of factors, non-local as well as local, may undermine local government and local democracy, especially centralization, economic decisions, external conflicts, dependency on civil servants, the dilution of elected representation, formalistic participation, skewed representation, class conflict and official attitudes. However, democratic local government can contribute to economic development, the reduction of inequality, a democratic political culture and the development of civil society, thereby strengthening local democracy.     

When local participation helps

Programs for the delivery of public goods and services are often more effective if the public participates in their planning and execution. Not all such activities benefit from public participation, however. Activities whose effectiveness most benefits from such participation are those whose local effects are variable; those that have to be made frequently but not routinely; those that require quick responses from the public; and those whose impact calls for major changes in the behavior of the public. Experience with irrigation projects in developing countries is consistent with this “sensitivity hypothesis,” but the hypothesis is probably applicable to the management of other goods and services such as social welfare, education, public health, and transportation.     

Urban local government finance in Nigeria: The case of Onitsha local government

Onitsha, located along the route that connects south-western and south-eastern Nigeria, has a very financially dynamic local government. Over one-quarter of the total revenues of this local government come from its market and motor parks. This is an unusual source for a local government that has perhaps the largest per capita revenue in Nigeria—almost N40, compared with the national average of N4.9. The procedure for collecting this revenue is regarded as highly successful since there is greater reliance on the citizens than tax officials. The volume of revenues collected has allowed the council maintain a large surplus revenue over a long period of time, which enables it to carry out important programmes of primary and adult education. It is also beginning to develop its property revenue collection system in collaboration with the Anambra State government.     

Risk management in local communities

This article discusses the current state of risk-management practices in local communities in the United States and offers some alternatives to present policies, which are mainly implicit rather than explicit attempts to limit overall risks of death and injury due to technological and natural causes. The article is divided into three sections. The first discusses the concept of risk-management as presently used in local government. The second section results from a limited survey of local risk-managers. The third section offers some policy alternatives. While generalization is itself risky, all of our observations point toward the conclusion that local government officials have little understanding of, hence little concern for, the quantity of risk posed for citizens by various hazards. If it seems desirable to place risk-management decisions in the hands of local officials, then some capacity for risk quantification, hence comparison, must be developed. The bulk of the policy suggestions at the end of this article concerns possible means through which this capacity might be augmented.     

Efficient local charity with self-selection

How is charitable giving within a city influenced by the prospect of donor and recipient migration? The theoretical literature on charitable contributions in a closed economy has mainly argued that the market level of private giving will tend to be lower than optimal, wherever there exists a local fiscal externality between donors and recipients. Interjurisdictional models of voluntary redistribution, on the other hand, abstract from altruism to explore the interjurisdictional fiscal externality resulting from the failure of one community to account for the migration impacts of its actions on other communities. This paper integrates and extends both literatures by allowing for local altruism among the mobile residents of a system of local economies. Within a single community, mobility thus introduces adverse selection considerations for each donor via the migration of both recipients and other donors. Moreover, any change in the local transfer level influences both equilibrium wages and donor behavior system-wide. The analysis demonstrates that the market level of local charitable giving will be lower than is either ‘locally’ or ‘globally’ optimal in some cases and plausibly higher than optimal in others, depending on the effect of migration and expectations on wages. The self-selection nature of donor decision making does eliminate the usual interjurisdictional fiscal externality, though it leaves a role for government intervention via subsidies to altruistic behavior.     

The cartelization of local governments

Intergovernmental competition can enhance efficiency. Centralization of government expenditures inhibits intergovernmental competition because it makes governments more homogeneous, and so cartelizes local governments. Cartelization reduces Tiebout competition, and limits benchmark competition in which one government??s performance can be compared with neighboring governments. Measuring fiscal centralization as the ratio of local to state and local government expenditures within the state, the evidence shows that more fiscal decentralization is associated with higher levels of state per capita income. Cartelization of local governments negatively impacts income.     

Reorganization for local administration in Zambia: An analysis of the local administration act, 1980

Analysing the Zambian administrative reforms of 1968 (Chikulo, 1981) we noted the increasing centralism, moves to strengthen party control over government administration and the closer control over local party officials by party appointees from the centre. These trends have been reinforced by the introduction of the Local Administration Act 1980 which came into force on 1 January 1981. The objective of the 1980 Act was to restructure the pattern of local administration in Zambia into an integrated system of administration. As a result, a single politico-administrative structure has been created in each district to which has been assigned the totality of government and party activity. As a consequence, the structure of local administration will not only bring the decision-making process to the district level, but also ensure close party control over the mechanism of field administration.     

The demand for local government goods

Abstract. This paper analyses the spending preferences of local government elected politicians. It is argued that the median voter model is inappropriate in multi-party systems that provide multiple government services, and that the preferences of the representatives are consequential to local resource allocation. We develop a micromodel in which service demand is conditioned by exogenous public revenue, prices, and demographic factors. We hypothesise that politicians demands are affected by party affiliation, public sector occupation and committee assignment. The estimates of the micro demand functions are based on data pertaining to Norwegian local governments. It is found that the estimated income elasticities correspond approximately with elasticities of output studies. Party affiliation has an impact on demand patterns, while government occupation and committee appointment are major determinants of politicians desired allocation of public services. Further analyses reveal that the numerical strength of parties impacts weakly on the actual service allocation, whereas the representation of government employees has occasional effect. The budgetary allocations are imperfect expressions of the elected council's underlying preferences.     

Public choice in local judicial systems

For their contributions to earlier drafts, acknowledgements are extended to Webb Smathers, Ron Faas, Rod Ziemer and other reviewers.     

Fiscal dynamics of local elected officials

The fiscal behavior of local elected officials is examined in a dynamic model where officials maximize an intertemporal objective function in two stages. Officials first decide upon an optimal mix of revenue and expenditure and then minimize loss and adjustment-cost functions. The model is tested using data from the 20 most populated U.S. cities whose mayor was elected on a four-year cycle. The empirical results support the model. Fiscal behavior differs between cities and local fiscal decisions made by elected officials are in part dependent on the timing of elections.     

Tax decentralization and local government size

This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal federalism and the sizes of local governments. While many empirical studies emphasized that grants encourage the growth of local public spending and local taxes constrain it, they are more silent regarding the effects of different types of tax autonomy. The paper addresses this issue by arguing that tax decentralization as organized on tax bases used only by local governments (tax-separation), rather than on tax-base sharing, would restrain local public expenditures. Using an unbalanced panel of OECD countries, the key finding is that only property taxes—mostly based on a “tax-separation” scheme—seem to favor smaller local governments. Thus, while tax decentralization is a necessary condition for limiting the growth of local governments, it does not appear sufficient, as tax-separation schemes among government levels would in fact be required.     

Mobilizing local resources in developing countries

Many developing countries are putting increased pressure on local governments to mobilize resources, especially to meet the recurrent costs of operating and maintaining locally sited capital projects. Local taxes, user charges and voluntary contributions are all possible mechanisms to carry out these efforts. Yet several important issues arise whenever these mobilization instruments are contemplated and evaluated. Several, often competing, objectives must be considered when evaluating fiscal instruments including the ability of the mechanism to raise revenues, its effect on economic efficiency, its equity implications and its administrative feasibility. After discussing each of these objectives, we show how numerous constraints, including those imposed by the political/legal system, administrative structure, the economy and the culture of the country, must be recognized while searching for a workable set of reforms that will mobilize additional resources without doing great harm to the other objectives. The key to these reforms would seem to be incentives or disincentives inherent in the revenue structure. Without recognizing these incentives or attempting to alter them, resource mobilization efforts are likely to go astray.     

Citizen-candidate mobility and endogenous local policy

In this paper we analyze the influence of personal mobility on the citizens’ willingness to run for a political office in their municipality and on the resulting local policy outcome. Our model portrays heterogeneous policy preferences that are coupled with different exogenous degrees of interjurisdictional mobility. We show that an increase in mobility can be liable to shift the policy outcome towards the preferred policy of the less mobile citizens. We thus identify an endogenous policy response to personal mobility diametrically opposed to the tax competition effect that has hitherto dominated the discussion of the political consequences of personal mobility.     

An empirical analysis of municipal efficiency and local resident satisfaction by council type in Victorian local government

Although a voluminous empirical literature has examined local government efficiency, much less attention has focused on municipal effectiveness and almost no effort has been directed at the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we seek to add to the latter nascent literature by investigating the relationship between operational efficiency and local resident satisfaction for three different municipal categories (metropolitan, regional, and rural councils) in the Victorian local government system over the period 2014–2015 to 2017–2018 using data envelopment analysis and an advanced regression model. We find that although a strong relationship exists between efficiency and satisfaction for metropolitan and regional councils, the same is not true of rural councils.     

Public choice in a local government setting

From its beginnings, public choice has always had a substantial component devoted to federalism and local government decision-making. The DeVoe Moore Center at Florida State University has made the study of local government within a public choice framework a core component of its mission. The Center held a conference February 17?C19, 2011, on public choice in a local government setting. This special issue of Public Choice contains the papers presented at that conference.     

Fragmentation and the growth of local government

An assumption of the post-World War II metropolitan reform movement was that fragmentation of metropolitan regions into multiple local governments was wasteful and inefficient, increasing the cost and size of government. More recently, ‘polycentrists’ have argued that the competition between multiple governments in metropolitan regions can in factreduce the growth in government by providing a competitive check on the excessive demands of local bureaucrats for more resources. In this article, I explore the effects of fragmentation on growth in the size of suburban municipal government budgets and in the number of services offered. Competition inherent in more fragmented metropolitan regions is shown to slow the expansion in local government expenditures and service levels.