The study analyses the phenomenon of municipal unions as the most structured form of inter-municipal cooperation in Italy. The paper aims to assess the effectiveness of the unions in reducing the expenditure of participating local municipalities. Its main contribution to existing research is the analysis of the medium-term - as well as the short-term - effects of inter-municipal cooperation, a perspective largely unexplored in previous studies of the situation in Italian.
The results show:
- that joining a municipal union can lead to a reduction in expenditure only for some municipal functions (such as general administration and local police);
- when a reduction in expenditure is observed, it occurs with some delay after joining the union.
