A new IMFG Paper explores economies of scale in municipal service delivery. Using an econometric model to estimate costs for fire and police services for 445 municipalities in the Canadian province of Ontario, author Adam Found, a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Toronto’s Department of Economics, finds that the costs per household are minimized for smaller municipalities—at populations of about 20,000 for fire and 50,000 for police services.
Entitled Economies of Scale in Fire and Police Services in Ontario, the study is one of two new papers in an ongoing series of publications by the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG) intended to inform debate on the fiscal health of cities and city-regions.
The second paper, entitled Hungary: An Unfinished Decentralization? examines the system of municipal finance in the Eastern European nation. Author Izabella Barati-Stec, Professor at the Faculty of Economics at Corvinus University, Budapest, explores the tensions in the post-communist era as the delegation of responsibilities to municipalities was not matched by the decentralization of fiscal authority. The result has been significant growth in municipal debt and fiscal instability.
The papers can also be accessed through theIMFG’s website.
The Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, focuses on the fiscal and governance problems facing large cities and city-regions. The IMFG Papers on Municipal Finance and Governance are designed to disseminate research being undertaken in Canada and abroad on municipal finance and governance issues. The series includes papers by academics and graduate students as well as international scholars.
For more information, please contact:
Enid Slack
Director, Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance
Munk School of Global Affairs
University of Toronto
1 Devonshire Place, Room 304N
Toronto, ON
M5S 3K7
416-946-0328
E: enid.slack@utoronto.ca