Factores explicativos de las formas de gestión de los servicios públicos locales y su influencia en el endeudamiento municipal y en el coste del servicio de recogida de residuos

Abstract

Abstract The main aim of this thesis is to define and identify the factors explaining why public managers provide municipal services in different ways, and to analyse the influence of different forms of management on municipal debt and on the cost of waste collection services. To do so, the thesis is structured into five chapters, after an initial introductory chapter, in the second chapter we shed light on which forms of management should be adopted by local administrations facing a situation of financial crisis and seeking an appropriate means to overcome it. We lay particular emphasis on the influence of fiscal stress on the adoption of diverse management alternatives, investigating and analysing formulas for public, private and intermunicipal cooperation. In this respect, a question of fundamental importance is that of predicting how fiscal stress will affect decisions to change or restructure the way in which public services are provided, toward the formulas advocated under New Public Management (NPM) to reduce costs and, therefore, alleviate fiscal stress. The results obtained in this chapter reveal that in times of fiscal crisis, municipalities opt for methods such as outsourcing and inter-municipal cooperation, which ratifies one of the major assumptions of NPM, but only as regards the application of techniques based on the business environment. Agencification and public firms are the options least often adopted in situations of fiscal stress, which is in accordance with Post-NPM postulates, under which excessive numbers of agencies and public companies increase the cost of administration. In the third chapter, we wish to determine which organisational and management structures result in these administrations presenting a given level of borrowing, because on some occasions instrumental agencies have been created in order to transfer debt from the local authority to another type of organisation, and so this debt no longer appears on the accounts of the local administration, which enables it to avoid borrowing restrictions. These are known as ¿off budget¿ operations. The results obtained indicate that outsourcing and inter-municipal cooperation forms are inversely related to municipal borrowing, thus we find evidence of the use of these types of management formulas to transfer debt from the municipal budget to other entities. In the fourth chapter, we seeks to identify which management formulas produce the greatest cost savings and improvements in quality, for the particular case of the waste collection service, which is one of the most complex and costly services that Spanish local authorities are obliged to provide. The results obtained show that the forms of public management in which services are provided directly by the local authority or through a shared approach, especially inter-municipal cooperation, obtain lower average service costs. Evidence has also been obtained that increasing service quality provokes increased costs, and that municipalities governed by an absolute majority have lower service costs than do those governed by a coalition. Finally, the fifth chapter of this thesis presents the most important conclusions drawn and proposes some future areas of investigation.