German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments’ vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of Baden-Württemberg). First, we consider local government cost efficiency. This indicates that there is a sub...

The Mais Médicos (More Doctors) Program has led to an increase in the number of doctors and medical treatment in primary health care services across Brazil. This article presents the results of a case-control study of groups of municipalities based on secondary data sources. It aims to explore and discuss a set of indicators of primary health care service delivery. An improvement in performance...

Local administratives face challenges similar to enterprises due to changes in their environment. Municipalities need to join their resources to reimburse and to deliver services. However, municipalities have not received much attention regarding ICT related integration, especially in cases when multiple municipalities are combined. Despite the central role of information systems in government ...

Introduction The purpose of this paper is to describe how the municipalities may benefit from using visualization in the planning process and when sharing knowledge within the municipality. As municipalities in different countries may have different prerequisites, a short overview of the local government in Sweden and the role of the Swedish municipalities give the necessary background. After t...

Effective management of information technology (IT) investments is increasingly important for Danish municipalities. This is why they along with other both public and private sector organizations increasingly are using IT business cases. The business case is a document specifying the main rationale behind the expected value and cost of an IT investment for the adopting organization. However, ex...

The scope of this article was to assess the nationwide scale of suicides among the elderly. An overview of suicides in Brazilian municipalities was conducted to identify municipalities with the highest incidence of suicide. Data from the Mortality Information System (SIM/MS) were used for the period from 1996 to 2007, using the events with codes X60 through X84 and Y87.0 of the 10th review of t...

OBJECTIVE To show the use of Linear Programming to evaluate the performance of Oral Health in Primary Care. METHODS This study used data from 19 municipalities of Santa Catarina city that participated of the state evaluation in 2009 and have more than 50,000 habitants. A total of 40 indicators were evaluated, calculated using the Microsoft Excel 2007, and converted to the interval [0, 1] in a...

Most inequality research on the relationship between inequality and mental health has focused on cross-country variation. Findings from within-country data are mixed. We examined whether changes in municipal Gini index or in the share of people living in relative poverty were linked to changes in the use of antidepressants in several Finnish municipalities between 1995 and 2010. We found that m...

OBJECTIVE To identify the characteristics of managers and their use of management instruments in primary care and to analyze differences in these features among municipalities of different sizes. METHOD The present cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted at 108 basic health units from 21 municipalities in northern Paraná, Brazil. The data were collected using a semi-structured questio...

This is the third in a series of reports on quality of life prepared by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) using information derived from a variety of national and municipal data sources. The first report, published in 1999, addressed the social effects of the severe economic recession of the early 1990s, focusing on the period 1991 to 1996. A second report, published in 2001, iden...