Measuring the quality of life in municipalities entails two empirical challenges. First, collecting a set of relevant indicators that can be compared across the municipalities. Second, using an appropriate aggregating tool in order to construct a synthetic index. This paper measures the quality of life for the largest 643 Spanish municipalities using Value Efficiency Analysis (VEA). The indicat...

A potential problem with local enforcement of national legislation is the varying level of application the decentralized structure may create. To study the severity of this problem, induced by mismatching local and national incentives, I look at the enforcement of the Swedish Environmental Code which is a national legislation enforced on the local level. I measure enforcement in terms of enviro...

Tax incentives offered to attract firms engaged in foreign direct investment are often tied to performance requirements such as domestic content restrictions. The tax competition literature has repeatedly shown that competition between municipalities for mobile firms tends to drive taxes to low levels. One would expect a comparable result for burdensome performance requirements. Despite this, t...

Tobacco Control Act (TCA), which among other things, restricts smoking in many public places and prohibits it in others. Many municipalities in Ontario, including some in the Greater Kingston Area (GKA), have passed bylaws prohibiting or limiting smoking in public places. In June and July 1996, we surveyed the GKA to determine support for a smoking ban in most indoor public places and workplace...

this paper seeks to explore the status of municipalities in the implementation of local social policy based on the existing legal framework though analyzing all legislations and regulations pertaining to municipalities (specially tehran municipality). the paper uses both quantitative and qualitative content analysis and applies thematic analysis. research findings indicate that most of tasks an...

Local government is part of a three-sphere system of government. The Constitution mandates municipalities to provide several important services, including the four basic services of water, sanitation, refuse and electricity. These services are enshrined in the country’s Bill of Rights and are a social and legal right of all citizens. To fulfil their obligations, municipalities need to be well f...

Several studies in Norway have shown large differences in risk factors for arteriosclerotic heart disease among municipalities. Today it is difficult to show specific differences in the standard of living between the various municipalities to explain these findings. However, such differences have previously existed, and were expressed by, for example, the variations in infant mortality from one...

OBJECTIVE to present a method for estimating low birth weight (LBW) prevalence and infant mortality rate (IMR) indicators for Brazilian municipalities, so as to incorporate considerations with regard to sampling fluctuation. METHODS binomial and Poisson distributions were used to estimate 95% confidence intervals (95%CI); when the number of infant deaths was zero, the upper limit of the 95%CI...

This paper describes how municipalities in the state of Ceará (Brazil) were encouraged to compete to obtain a Municipal Seal of Approval, based on their performance in meeting children's needs and rights. It describes how the programme was implemented, including the criteria used to judge performance, the communication strategy to encourage municipal participation and the measures taken to avoi...

The cooperative inter-municipal waste collection can be a real added value in terms of costs reduction and high performance services. The chapter proposes a Multi Agent Approach to support the inter-municipal infrastructure. The Multi Agent Systems (MAS) is an approach suitable to implement a distributed physically problem as the inter-municipal waste collection. The architecture of the approac...