Economies of scale and sustainability in local government: A complex issue

Local governments may seek efficient public service delivery through scaling up production, and the quest for the optimal local government size has attracted extensive attention of scholars and policy makers. Indeed, if scale matters for local government efficiency, increasing size may be a key factor in achieving more value for money for...

Economies of scale and scope in mental health care

Economies of scale and scope are usually derived under the assumption that the set of production possibilities are shared by all firms in an industry irrespective of whether they specialize in a single output or not. Mental health care institutions in the Netherlands vary substantially in the scale and the number of outputs. Estimation of one...