Is there a "zoo effect" in French local governments?
2011
Frère, Quentin | Hammadou, Hakim | Paty, Sonia
From the observation that many public goods –such as zoos– are indivisible, OATES (1988) put forward the idea that the range of public goods should increase with localities’ size; this is the “zoo effect”. But despite this argument appears obvious, it suffers from a limited empirical literature. Therefore, the purpose of the present paper is to test this theoretical argument using data on French inter-municipalities, i.e. local governments that gather several municipalities together in order to manage some local goods. Depending on their spatial position, we split our data set into three groups: urban, suburban and rural inter-municipalities. Using spatial econometrics, estimation results provide evidence for the existence of a zoo effect in French inter-municipalities. In other terms, we find that the variety of services provided in larger inter-municipalities exceeds those in smaller communities. Moreover, the intensity of the zoo effect depends on the urban-rural gradient. It is less intense in the suburban and rural areas than in the urban communities.
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