Empirical Analysis of Economic and Social Prerequisites and Consequences of Enlargement of Municipalities

The work analyzes the global experience of structural transformation of local self-government, showing that the process of local self-government reform is moving in the direction of reducing the total number and consolidation of municipalities. An empirical analysis of the economic and social prerequisites and consequences of the consolidation of municipalities has been carried out; it has been shown that the classic economic argument in favor of amalgamations of municipalities — achieving «economies of scale» — manifests itself only in the case of small and minute municipalities. The current approaches to assessing the economic and social consequences of the consolidation of municipalities in Russia and abroad are analyzed. It is shown that when merging municipalities, one cannot focus only on economic parameters, since the social goals of local government must also be respected - the provision of municipal services and increasing the social activity of the population within the boundaries of municipalities. It has been revealed that in the Russian Federation, as well as abroad, the process of merging municipalities is most often welcomed and supported by state authorities, often taking into account only qualitative parameters, without a corresponding quantitative assessment of the economic consequences of the consolidation process itself. A methodological approach to measuring the local socio-economic effects of the consolidation of municipalities is proposed, taking into account both calculated qualitative (social) and quantitative (economic) parameters, which allows a more conscious justification of the potential results of the process of municipal mergers. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the substantiation of theoretical and practice-oriented proposals for improving the quantitative assessment of the process of consolidation of municipalities during the reform of local self-government.