Formal or Substantial Innovation: Enquiring the Internal Control System Reform in the Italian Local Government

Abstract

Understanding the reasons for the failure or the success of reforms is an issue that has recently attracted the attention of many scholars in the public sector field. The present study tries to contribute to this debate focusing on the social and cultural environment of the communities wherein the reforms are introduced as well as on their structural characteristics. The research is based on a survey carried out on a representative sample of Italian municipalities, whose aim is to understand the state of accomplishment of the Italian local government financial management reform. To this end, a set of internal control tools and techniques is analysed to assess whether they have been adopted and how they have been used. The findings of this part of the study are then related to the size of the entities -used as a proxy for the organizations visibility and complexity -as well as to their geographic location -used as a proxy of their socioeconomic environment. Results show that both the social and structural characteristics have influenced the reform accomplishment.

Innovation in public services: The case of Spanish local government

“…Regarding the impact of size on innovation propensity, the largest town halls, with higher numbers of inhabitants, higher budgets and higher staff numbers show more propensity to innovate, which confirms the hypotheses formulated in prior studies (Damanpour and Schneider, 2008;Hansen, 2011;Reginato et al, 2011). One of the most relevant characteristics of town hall strategic profiles is the desire to achieve qualitative aims and to ensure that services reach the highest possible number of users, without underestimating aspects such as diversity and respect for social minorities.…”

“…The study of Reginato et al (2011) reveals that larger municipalities more often adopt innovations. The explanation according to these authors lies in the higher visibility and complexity of larger municipalities.…”

“…These authors also highlight the fact that larger organizations own more human and financial resources to test and implement innovations and also to finance them. Reginato et al (2011) use the number of inhabitants to measure municipality size. In turn, Damanpour and Schneider (2008) also estimate size according to the resources available to the local government.…”

“…The present paper considers the level of innovation existing in Spanish local government and attempts to identify the most common innovation types using the innovation model of Walker (2006). As in previous studies (Akgün, Keskin, and Byrne, 2012;Hansen, 2011;Reginato, Paglietti, and Fadda, 2011), this paper will try to determine whether the level and/or type of innovation relate to certain internal characteristics of organizations such as their size.…”

Governmental accounting reforms at a time of crisis: the Italian governmental accounting harmonization

“…As for GA, forms of accrual-based reporting were adopted only by LGs as a mere formal enlargement of the financial reporting area, since neither mandatory double-entry book-keeping nor an alteration of the commitment basis of budgets was required. Indeed, the informative content of central and regional governments' budget system remained input-oriented in general, confirming that the reforms in those years were strongly dominated by a legalistic approach (Reginato et al, 2011). Despite the massive reforms that followed one another throughout the 1990s, their implementation not only has been characterized by the absence of a common framework for the whole of the Italian public administration but also has been judged to be rather unsuccessful (ManesRossi et al, 2019).…”