Local government policy intervention, especially by means of structural reform, requires a detailed knowledge of the scale and scope characteristics of the local government services, explicitly solid urban waste collection and wastewater treatment. However, unfortunately little is known about scale economies in Portuguese municipal services, apart from water. The main contribution of this paper is to address this gap in the empirical literature on Portuguese local government. The major objectives of the paper are: (a) to investigate whether scale economies can explain differential council performance in terms of treating wastewater and collecting urban waste and (b) how this might shed light on the question of optimal jurisdictional size, i.e., the quantity of consumed resources and the volume of delivered services that maximize council productivity. By using a non-radial input-oriented model, we examine scale economies and optimal scale size for all 308 Portuguese local councils over the years 2008 and 2015. We find that (dis)economies of scale arise within each council cluster considered and as a probable consequence of combining the activities of two or more councils. We attempt to draw various policy implications from the analysis.

地方政府的政策干预，尤其是通过结构改革的干预，需要对地方政府服务的规模和范围特征，明确的城市垃圾收集和废水处理有详细的了解。但是，不幸的是，除了水之外，人们对葡萄牙市政服务的规模经济知之甚少。本文的主要贡献在于解决有关葡萄牙地方政府的经验文献中的这一空白。该文件的主要目标是：（a）研究规模经济是否可以在处理废水和收集城市废物方面解释理事会的绩效，以及（b）如何阐明最佳管辖范围的问题，即：消耗的资源数量和提供的服务数量，可最大程度地提高议会的生产力。通过使用非径向输入导向模型，我们研究了2008年和2015年间所有308个葡萄牙地方议会的规模经济和最佳规模。合并两个或多个理事会的活动的可能结果。我们试图从分析中得出各种政策含义。