The Auckland debate: is big city governance always this difficult?

Governing fast-growing metropolitan areas is always difficult, and the history of Auckland governance is no exception. This is so for no other reason than the fact that they keep growing: as population increases the alignment of urban and jurisdictional boundaries breaks down, creating problems of coordination and fragmenting decision making. In addition, the increasingly complex pattern of councils results in tax exporting and what economists describe as spill overs, where peri-urban councils benefit from the expenditure of their larger neighbours while areas further out question the local benefits of centrally-based facilities. Consider, for example, the debate over the Auckland Regional Amenities Funding Act 2008.

The Interaction between Tolls and Capacity Investment in Serial and Parallel Transport Networks

The purpose of this paper is to compare price and capacity competition in simple serial and parallel transport networks, where individual links are operated by different authorities. We find more tax exporting in serial transport corridors than on parallel road networks. The inability to toll transit has quite dramatic negative welfare effects on parallel networks; in serial transport corridors, it may actually be undesirable to allow the tolling of transit at all. Finally, if the links are exclusively used by transit transport, toll and capacity decisions are independent in serial networks. When regions compete for transit in a parallel setting, higher regional capacity implies lower Nash equilibrium tolls.