County-city consolidation and sustainability: Empirical evidence from Taiwan’s local experience in the 2010s

Governmental sustainable development pertains to the realm of collective action, which generates economies of scale in which the actors share the costs of their actions. Through consolidation, an originally adjoint city is merged with a county, facilitating the sustainable development of collective action within local governments. This study empirically corroborated the relationship between the time since local government consolidation (in years) and sustainability. Open government data were used to establish a secondary database; data from Taiwan’s 22 cities and counties were collected over a multiyear period, before and after county-city consolidation. Time-series analysis and event history analysis (survival analysis models) were employed to corroborate whether county-city consolidation positively affects sustainability. County-city consolidation contributed to improvements in sustainability, only in regard to the growth rate of per capita annual disposable income and the growth rate of tertiary education of 15+ age in the jurisdictions. This research then concluded that the extreme integration approach of local governments under county-city consolidation may promote collective sustainability-related benefits, but it may simultaneously enlarge the poverty gap in the society.