Evidence on economies of scale in local public service provision: A meta-analysis

The standard theory of optimal jurisdictional size hinges on the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods and services. However, despite its relevance for forced local amalgamation programs and related policies, the empirical evidence on the existence of such economies of scale remains elusive. The main goal of this paper is to produce an updated and comprehensive quantitative review of the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods using a meta-analysis approach to systematize the wide range of empirical approaches and modeling frameworks found in the previous literature. Our analysis confirms the presence of moderately increasing to constant returns to scale in the provision of local services with no reduction in the average costs of production in the delivery of most local public services beyond a certain, modest jurisdictional size, which many studies have estimated at 10,000 residents. Also, the potential for economies of scale differs at least across three traditional services: education, water and sanitation, and garbage collection, being highest for education and lowest for garbage collection. Our analysis also offers guidelines for future empirical research in this area. Physical output and production cost data should be used, together with translog specifications for the modeling of cost functions. Last, we find evidence that the determinants of output cost elasticity include bidirectional publication bias and population density but do not include the presence or absence of modern “lean” production technologies or the (perceived) capital intensity of the sector, contrary to conventional wisdom. These findings have significant policy implications for countries considering jurisdictional consolidation programs.     

Inter- and intraregional inequality in a spatial economy

In this paper, we develop a three-region economic geography model with workers of heterogeneous skills and mobility rates to consider how first-nature, regional differences impact both inter- and intraregional inequality. In our model, the skill premium within a region summarizes both the degree of intraregional inequality between mobile, skilled workers and immobile, unskilled workers and the interregional inequality through differences in the welfare of unskilled workers across regions. Regions with the highest skill premium have the greatest degree of intraregional inequality and provide the lowest level of welfare to unskilled workers, relative to other regions. We find that the skill premium will be higher in regions with a greater supply of unskilled labor, lower supply of housing, or are more remote. An increase in a region's housing supply or centrality will lower intraregional inequality and raise the welfare of the local, unskilled workforce. However, the magnitude of these changes are declining in the initial number of skilled workers in the region. The model is extended to consider imperfectly elastic housing supply. The larger the price elasticity of housing, the larger the range of values, such that more populated regions will host a disproportionate share of skilled workers, have lower levels of intraregional inequality, and provide higher levels of welfare for unskilled workers.     

Analyzing the association of policy narratives with problem tractability in the implementation of EU decisions: Evidence from the phytosanitary policy area

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) suggests that narratives can be employed to define and contest policy problems. Yet, few NPF studies have explicitly addressed the narrative portrayal of problem intractability. What role do narratives play in a situation of uncertainty about the causes and solutions of the problem, when strong divergences regarding the values and interests of the policy actors exist? The article anchors the NPF to the literatures on problem definition and implementation to advance two propositions about (a) how differences in the use of narrative elements can be suggestive of the degree of problem (in-)tractability; and (b) whether other elements of tractability, namely the presence of a valid causal theory, are associated with the usage of narrative strategies. I test the propositions by analyzing media commentaries surrounding the implementation of European decisions to tackle a tree-killing epidemic in Italy. The findings suggest that narratives can helpfully illustrate the intractability inherent in the policy debate. However, narratives can also develop independently of factors that the implementation literature understands as conducive to lowering intractability, namely knowledge accumulation. The NPF may represent a promising alternative to understand policy implementation processes.     

Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

Emerging debates on the contemporary reconfigurations of work question previous understandings of the relationships among and between waged, unwaged, and reproductive labour, situated processes of value formation and/or enclosure, and the constitution and limits of contemporary capitalism. Taking Cindi Katz's notion of countertopographies and Gillian Hart's notion of relational comparison as inspirations, this Symposium draws attention to new and existing conceptual frames and modes of analysis to situate contemporary permutations of work within the shifting dynamics of uneven development in specific state, local, and institutional contexts. This Introduction summarises the interrelated and overlapping contributions that papers in this Symposium offer methodologically, analytically, and politically. The open-ended aspiration that emerges from these contributions is that close attention to heterogeneous formations of work outside the wage might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the co-optation and enclosure of people's creative energies, and move toward realising the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest.     

Improvised Hybridity in the “Fixing” of Chinese Infrastructure Capital: The Case of Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway

The article explores the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio-political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.     

Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Building on the concept of monetary dependency from scholarship on financial subordination, I analyse the monetary politics of debt in Cambodia. Drawing on elite interviews and ethnographic research, I argue that Cambodia's extreme monetary dependence on the US dollar has shaped monetary and fiscal policies that compel poorer households to take on private debt to pay for their basic needs. This paper advances critical geographies of debt and development by studying financial subordination and its impact on financial inclusion in the global South.     

Police and Politics in Aesthetics-Based Urban Governance: Redevelopment and Grassroots Struggles in Enninglu,Guangzhou, China

Rancière's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemonic aesthetic regime and bottom-up aesthetic practices can be mutually constitutive and reside in relationships of co-existence and mutual negotiation. Drawing on over a decade's investigation in Enninglu, a neighbourhood district in Guangzhou that underwent several rounds of political struggles related to redevelopment and conservation, we reveal how local residents negotiated aesthetic norms enacted by the state. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between the aesthetic regime imposed by the state and grassroots people reclaiming their own aesthetic sensibilities, culminating in a contingent, inconclusive, and “impure” space of politics. Both political subjectivities and aesthetic norms are redefined ongoingly in this process.     

Political institutions,punctuated equilibrium theory,and policy disasters

This paper develops a theory of the relationship between policy disasters and political institutions. Policy disasters, defined as avoidable, unintended extreme negative policy outcomes, are important political, and historical events above that receive relatively little attention from political scientists and scholars of public policy. Using the predictions of punctuated equilibrium theory, I argue that systems with higher error accumulation will experience more policy disasters. Systems with more veto players and weaker information flows will experience more policy disasters, but information flows will have a stronger impact than veto players. I test this theory using data on financial crises and natural and technological disasters across 70 countries over 60 years. I find strong evidence that systems with weaker information flows and more veto players tend to have greater policy disaster risk.     

What's the grand story? A macro-narrative analytical model and the case of Swiss child and adult protection policy

This paper expands on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by adding a theoretical and empirical exploration into macrolevel narratives. Existing NPF research largely neglects macrolevel narratives, which prevents the NPF from developing its full power. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) It provides a definition of macrolevel narratives by conceptualizing them as the “story form” of a policy paradigm. (2) It proposes a model and an empirical approach, which may lay the foundation for a standard macrolevel NPF approach. (3) It contributes to the NPF's aim of connecting the macro and meso level. The paper tests the model in a comparative multi-method design applied to the Swiss child and adult protection policy. The findings show that macrolevel NPF analysis helps understand where mesolevel policy debates come from, namely from an underlying paradigm and its effects on institutions and culture that enable and constrain macrolevel narratives.     

Mixed messages & bounded rationality: The perverse consequences of real ID for immigration policy

Policies concerning undocumented immigrants are inevitably ambivalent, creating uncertainty and confusion in the implementation process. We identify a clear example of this ambivalence —U.S. law setting standards for determining the credibility of asylum seekers—that resulted in an increase in asylum grants despite policymakers' intention to make it harder for individuals to obtain the status. We argue that this law, The REAL ID Act of 2005, sent mixed messages to immigration judges (IJs), street-level bureaucrats who implement immigration policy. It increased IJ discretion, but set vague limits. We theorize that IJs, behaving in a bounded rationality framework, use their professional legal training as a short-cut and look primarily to the courts for guidance. Our evidence supports our argument. After the passage of the REAL ID Act, IJ decision-making is more closely aligned with the preferences of their political and legal principals, and, in the final score, the federal circuit courts are the winners.