Functional responsibilities of municipal government: Metropolitan disparities and instruments of intergovernmental management

This paper examines the functional responsibilities of municipal government, in the context of intergovernmental interactions in metropolitan areas of the USA. It presents an operationalisation of the functional responsibilities of municipal government: measures of size and breadth of those responsibilities assess the reliability of the findings across those related measurements. Alternative explanations are tested for differences in the functional responsibilities of municipal government in metropolitan (metro) areas. The central finding is that the functional responsibilities of municipal government vary widely; additional findings are that regional and intergovernmental contexts shape those responsibilities, based on a pooled time-series analysis of municipal governments. The paper reports census-normalised data that can be utilised for research extensions. Although its primary contribution is to research on functional responsibilities of municipal government, the paper also proposes a local public economies approach to identify factors influencing the breadth of those responsibilities in metropolitan areas.

Globalization, Democracy, and the Public Sector in Asia

In this era of globalization, does democracy in Asia have a mediating impact on a country's public sector? As the first empirical analysis focused solely on Asian countries, this paper finds that, in general, democracies are associated with a larger government. In particular, democracies more exposed to the global trade have larger public economies. This is not the case, however, in democracies more dependent on foreign direct investment.

Challenges and growth: the development of the interdisciplinary field of institutional analysis

This article briefly describes some of the intellectual challenges during the last half-century to the traditional fields of economics and political science: the public choice approach, the tragedy of the commons debate, the ‘new’ institutional economics, and behavioral game theory. Then, the components of a basic institutional analysis framework are presented that provide a general method for analyzing public economies and diverse forms of collective action. Empirical research related to metropolitan public economies, common-pool resources, and behavioral game theory is summarized that has contributed to the field of institutional analysis. The last section concludes that the macro foundations of institutional analysis appear firmer than the micro foundations related to the model of the individual to be used and discusses this puzzle.