This book provides a comprehensive treatment of traditional as well as newer topics in local public, fiscal and financial management principles and practices. It covers traditional topics of local public management, local revenue administration with special emphasis on property tax administration, local budgeting and accounting, and methods of capital finance. Newer topics covered include political economy of local government, fiscal rules for local fiscal discipline, local government integrity and performance accountability, and municipal mergers and inter-municipal cooperation based upon relative importance and political, fiscal and administrative autonomy of local governments. The treatment is non-technical and suitable for a wide variety of audiences including scholars, instructors, students, policy advisors, and practitioners.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of traditional as well as newer topics in local public, fiscal and financial management principles and practices. It covers traditional topics of local public management, local revenue administration with special emphasis on property tax administration, local budgeting and accounting, and methods of capital finance. Newer topics covered include political economy of local government, fiscal rules for local fiscal discipline, local government integrity and performance accountability, and municipal mergers and inter-municipal cooperation based upon relative importance and political, fiscal and administrative autonomy of local governments. The treatment is non-technical and suitable for a wide variety of audiences including scholars, instructors, students, policy advisors, and practitioners.

Australian local government finds itself operating under conditions of acute financial austerity, manifested most plainly in a burgeoning infrastructure backlog. Various policy measures have been adopted to relieve this financial distress, most notably recent structural reform programs centred on forced council amalgamation. However, compulsory consolidation has not only failed to achieve its intended aims, but it has also served to diminish `local voice' and `local choice' and left a lasting legacy of bitterness and division. By contrast, as an alternative method of reaping the benefits of scale, scope, specialisation and size in local government service provision, but without all the deleterious effects of forced council mergers, service shared services offer significant promise for local government. Councils in Cooperation is the first attempt to comprehensively explore and assess the potential of resource sharing, shared services and other forms of inter-council cooperation in the Australian local government sector. Drawing on the full weight of international and Australian literature, Councils in Cooperation evaluates the theoretical literature on shared services and advances a new conceptual framework for explaining the comparative performance of shared service programs in practice. The authors consider alternative models of shared service provision and investigate the relative merits of these models. The book then systematically assesses the global empirical evidence on shared services and explores successful - and failed - attempts at shared services in the Australian milieu, providing various case studies of Regional Organisations of Councils, Strategic Alliances as well as vertical and horizontal shared service arrangements in contexts as varied as Greater Western Sydney, the NSW Central Tablelands and Riverina, and Outback Queensland. The policy implications arising from this wealth of material are examined in depth in Councils in Cooperation. The authors present a cogent case for policy makers to encourage local authorities to pursue shared service arrangements in selected areas of policy provision so as to reap the benefits which can flow from larger scale and greater specialisation, rather than rely on the heavy-handed and blunt instrument of forced amalgamation. Moreover, heightened cooperation between councils may well foster a `bottom-up' revival of regional development with much better prospects for success than the current pattern of `top-down' regionalism simply imposed on regional communities by national and state governments.

For the past several decades, Australian local government has faced relentless financial pressures. In attempting to maintain service levels, most local authorities have invested too little in local infrastructure maintenance and renewal. The main symptom of this malaise has been a burgeoning infrastructure backlog, which now far exceeds the fiscal capacity of a majority of councils. Various remedial policy measures have been espoused to relieve this financial distress, most notably structural reform programs based on forced mergers. However, compulsory consolidation has failed to achieve its intended aims, and financial unsustainability has become more acute. Obviously other avenues must now be pursued if Australian local government is to remain viable.