Does government fragmentation enhance or hinder metropolitan economic growth

Economic growth is an important priority for many local governments. There is a long-standing theoretical debate on how to best organize government for economic growth. There is surprisingly little empirical research focusing on how government organization affects regional growth. In this paper we forward several recent measures of government fragmentation in contrast to the common measure of government units per capita to examine how government competition influences growth, testing them in a metropolitan statistics area (MSA) growth model for 1992 - 2002. Going somewhat against the current embrace of regional collaboration, our results suggest that regions with relatively fragmented governments had stronger relative economic performance over the study's time frame. Copyright (c) 2010 the author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2010 RSAI.

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