County-city consolidation and sustainability: Empirical evidence from Taiwan’s local experience in the 2010s

ABSTRACT

Governmental sustainable development pertains to the realm of collective action, which generates economies of scale in which the actors share the costs of their actions. Through consolidation, an originally adjoint city is merged with a county, facilitating the sustainable development of collective action within local governments. This study empirically corroborated the relationship between the time since local government consolidation (in years) and sustainability. Open government data were used to establish a secondary database; data from Taiwan’s 22 cities and counties were collected over a multiyear period, before and after county-city consolidation. Time-series analysis and event history analysis (survival analysis models) were employed to corroborate whether county-city consolidation positively affects sustainability. County-city consolidation contributed to improvements in sustainability, only in regard to the growth rate of per capita annual disposable income and the growth rate of tertiary education of 15+ age in the jurisdictions. This research then concluded that the extreme integration approach of local governments under county-city consolidation may promote collective sustainability-related benefits, but it may simultaneously enlarge the poverty gap in the society.

KEYWORDS:

• Local governments
• collective actions
• county-city consolidation
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode = A0040003.

2. https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode = D0070230.

3. https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode = D0070001.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported by the research project “The impact of interlocal integration─Evidence-based analysis on county-city consolidation and interlocal collaboration” sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan. Grant number:107-2410-H-305-044. This research is also funded by the Research Center for Public Opinion and Election in National Taipei University, Taiwan. The initial draft of this paper was inspired by the second author’s master-degree thesis.

Notes on contributors

Ssu-Hsien Chen

Ssu-Hsien Chen (Olivia) was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She has a BA degree in Philosophy and a minor in Business Management from Fu Jen Catholic University, an MPA degree in Public Affairs from Ming Chuan University, and a PhD degree in Public Administration and Policy from Florida State University. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at National Taipei University, Taiwan. Her research interests include policy analysis, local/metropolitan governance, energy policies, interlocal networks and interactions, and the use of performance measurement in public sectors.

Wan-Chi Kuo

Wan-Chi Kuo was a master-degree student at the program of Public Administration and Policy at National Taipei University, Taiwan. Her research interests include quantitative research and sustainable development. The key words of her master-degree thesis are local government consolidation, collective action, county-city consolidation and sustainability of counties and cities.