ABSTRACT

Municipalities´ service delivery choices are under constant public debate. To better understand the configurations of service delivery forms across different municipalities, we analyse all 309 Finnish municipalities’ delivery of 10 social and healthcare services. Five clusters emerge: Collaborators, Supplementers, Purchasers, Privatizers and Decentralizers (likely representing municipalities in transition). Overall, mixed delivery dominates. While the clusters present differences in municipal characteristics, surprisingly few statistically significant cost differences emerge, suggesting different configurations of efficient service delivery choices exist. Smaller municipalities can achieve economies of scale by collaboration, while large municipalities seem to ‘get away’ with going against transaction cost economics theory recommendations.

摘要

市政当局的服务提供选择一直处于公开辩论之中。为了更好地了解不同城市的服务提供形式配置，我们分析了芬兰所有 309 个城市提供的 10 项社会和医疗保健服务。出现了五个集群：合作者、补充者、购买者、私有化者和权力下放者（可能代表转型中的市政当局）。总体而言，混合交付占主导地位。虽然这些集群在市政特征方面存在差异，但令人惊讶的是，几乎没有出现统计上显着的成本差异，这表明存在不同的高效服务交付选择配置。较小的市政当局可以通过合作实现规模经济，而大型市政当局似乎在违背交易成本经济学理论建议的情况下“逍遥法外”。