Purpose Since the 1980s, governments worldwide have been implementing the move from
cash to accrual accounting. Scholars initially considered the appropriateness of this …

Territorial reform is the most radical and contested reorganisation of local government. A
sound evaluation of the outcome of such reforms is hence an important step to ensure the …

This chapter looks for main differences among local government systems as well as
similarities among them. This has been done by the authors with the aim to grasp the …

Cooperation among fragmented local entities for service delivery is a common problem in
Europe that has been understudied from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view …

We investigate how the reorganization of the service-delivery 'machine'is resulting in a
hybridization of NPM and post-NPM principles. We compare reform trajectories in Italy and …

This article contributes to the debate on the incorporation of performance information in
European local government budgets. At the core is the development of an analytical model …

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art on the creation of arm's length bodies (ALBs) by
local governments. We make three main contributions. First, there are many different types of …

The impact of financial austerity in many countries and the need to set the direction for
governments have radically changed several aspects of Public sector management (Rubin …

Scholars have found it difficult to identify the impact of austerity on policy outputs. This
difficulty may have arisen because studies tend to focus on the content of national and EU …

In current thinking about public service improvement, civil servant creativity plays an
important role. Using the results of 43 semi‐structured interviews, we assessed the degree …