The temporal dependence of public policy evaluation: the case of local government amalgamation

ABSTRACT

Amalgamation has been a cornerstone of many local government reform programmes internationally. However, there has been a lack of consensus in the academic literature surrounding the outcomes associated with amalgamation. One potential explanation for this is the difference in the length of time over which the evaluation takes place. In order to determine if the impacts of boundary reform are indeed temporally dependent on nature, we collected and analysed a 17-year panel of empirical data from a large-scale amalgamation programme in 2008. Our results indicate that the outcomes arising from the program do indeed display variation over time, with initial savings being negated by increased costs in the medium-term and ultimately an insignificant impact over the long term. The public policy implications and recommendations suggested by our analysis have important implications for the design and evaluation of future local government boundary reform programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Local government
• boundary reform
• amalgamation
• public policy evaluation
• temporally dependent reform outcomes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although this would rise to 77 following four successful de-amalgamations.

2. Full results are available from the corresponding author upon request.

3. Significant at the 1% level (p = 0.009; p = 0.004). Results available upon request.

4. This distinction was necessary given that employee savings were expected to come from reductions in administrative positions (see LGRC 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Tokyo Human Resource Fund for City Diplomacy Scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Dana McQuestin

Dana McQuestin is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney and has recently graduated with a PhD from Tokyo Metropolitan University in 2021 under a dual arrangement. Her research focuses on local government financial sustainability, financial performance, intergovernmental grant allocation and measuring the outcomes arising from local government reform.

Joseph Drew

Joseph Drew is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Local Government at the University of Technology Sydney, and adjunct Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University. His principal research interests are government financial sustainability, performance monitoring, natural law philosophy, and the art of selling public policy. He is the author of three books including: Reforming Local Government (2020) and Saving Local Government (2022).

Hirokuni Iiboshi

Hirokuni Iiboshi is Professor of the Graduate School of Management at Tokyo Metropolitan University. He specialises in econometrics with a focus on empirical macro-economics but has recently been working on micro-econometric analysis using causal inference. He has published articles in the Journal of Money, Credit & Banking, Economic Modelling, and the Journal of Asian Economics.