Municipal mergers remain an important instrument of local government policy in numerous countries, including Australia, despite some concerns surrounding its efficacy. We consider the claim that amalgamations enhance the technical efficiency of the merged entities by examining the 2008 Queensland compulsory consolidation program that reduced the number of local authorities from 157 to 73 councils. To test the claim, we conduct locally intertemporal data envelopment analysis over the period 2003-2013 inclusive. Our evidence suggests that (1) in the financial year preceding the mergers, there was no statistically significant difference in the typical efficiency scores of amalgamated and non-amalgamated councils and (2) 2 years following the mergers, the typical technical efficiency score of the amalgamated councils was well below the non-amalgamated cohort. We argue this may be attributed to increased spending on staffing expenses, although comparatively larger operational expenditure also served to diminish efficiency.

Local government amalgamations, mostly aimed at improving financial sustainability, remain a strongly contested public policy option. Proponents of amalgamation tend to emphasise the advantages of scale and plan around population size targets. By contrast, some scholars note the importance of understanding the needs and tastes of residents for local public services and stress the dangers of amalgamation dominated by population size considerations alone. In this paper, we conduct a robust empirical investigation of a recent amalgamation program dominated by population size considerations. Our results suggest that local government boundaries constructed principally to secure scale benefits have largely failed to deliver on the pecuniary promise of its public policy proponents. We conclude by offering some central public policy recommendations aimed at ensuring that future amalgamation programs might be more successful.

Shared services are often lauded as an efficacious means of reducing municipal expenditure and thereby improving waning financial sustainability. However, most of the extant theoretical and empirical work only considers costs and benefits at the level of the specific service in question and, hence, fails to capture many of the wider benefits and costs that might accrue to local governments. In this article we first build a schema to illustrate the benefits and costs of moving from separate to collaborative production at the level of individual local authorities. We then test two hypotheses drawn from the schema against a five-year panel of expenditure data. We find evidence of increased expenditure in the order of 8 per cent that prima facie runs counter to the objectives of many municipal managers engaged with shared services. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for cooperative ventures between local authorities.

Public input into decision-making through participatory and deliberative democratic practices has become a widely accepted and legislated responsibility of Australian local governments. At any one time, councils are leading submission processes, workshops and online surveys on a multitude of projects, ranging from long-term community strategic plans to public art projects. The increase in these practices has been exponential, leaving little time for critical reflection. The lack of empirical data to illustrate how community engagement is understood and practised in different councils has hindered sector-wide reflection. This paper presents the findings of the 'Local Government Community Engagement Census', a survey of 175 councilsapproximately half from four of Australia's eastern states. This sectoral snapshot provides a picture of how councils understand, prioritise and practise community engagement, allowing critical reflection, an interpretation of implications and suggesting areas for future research.

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