Municipal Size and Efficiency in Romania: Larger is Better?

Abstract

Territorial reforms took place in several countries of Western Europe beginning with 1950 and of the Central and Eastern Europe after 1990. The theoretical premises of these reforms were those that larger local authorities will be more efficient in delivering public services to citizens, tailor made for local needs. Unfortunately, the reality proved a little much more complex; the reforms determined different administrative and economic outputs, so the 'economies of scale' and 'democracy' arguments remained without a definitive answer and the debates are still dividing specialists and political leaders. The paper analyses those territorial reforms and their relevance in the context of Romanian current debates and realities. The findings from the case of other countries are compared with data of the Romanian municipalities (by municipality understanding any local administrative unit), and implication on the optimal municipal size, cost-efficiency improvements, impact on local democracy and political participation are discussed. The conclusion is that any territorial reform should be done looking to all the possible outputs (in terms of size, but also of the density of population, availability and costs of public services, decentralization and local democracy, participation in political life, protection of the ethnic minorities, etc.) and how these will affect citizens. More than that, the data regarding Romanian municipalities shows there is no evident correlation between some financial indicators and population size. This means that an up-scaling will have the impact of reducing the number of municipalities but will not change the performance of that local authorities.