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There is high interest in economic development efforts involving cooperation or collaboration among metropolitan jurisdictions. To determine why some local governments engage in cooperative agreements while others do not, this paper investigates transaction obstacles, including bargaining, information, agency, enforcement, and division problems. The authors then advance an institutional collective action explanation for intergovernmental cooperation, focusing on the conditions under which these transactions costs are low. This work anticipates that the costs associated with interlocal cooperation are influenced by the demographic characteristics of communities, local political institutions, and the nature of regional government networks. Empirical analysis based on a national survey of local development officials provides support for several predictions from this model and identifies policy variables that, in turn, increase the prospects for cooperation, specifically through the development of informal policy networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of state assumption of the CDBG-Small Cities program have been limited by two factors. First, they have been single-state case studies or confined to a small number of states. Second, they have adopted a narrow context for examining the likely impacts of community development following state assumption. This paper attempts to expand policy information based upon earlier work by studying a larger cross-section of states and considering the issues of redistribution and decentralization from a broader context. We find some significant policy changes from previous HUD program management but suggest that such may be due to the CDBG economic development amendment and an increase in multipurpose projects in the states. Unlike Morgan and England's (1984) recent article in PAR, we suggest that decentralization may not necessarily lead to decreasing redistributive community development policies in the states. Rather, redistribution may be incorporated within the enlarging proportion of multipurpose projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the relationship between public administration and economic development. Topics discussed include analysis of public administration; implementation of public policy; and need of human betterment along with antitrust to environmental regulation and fundamental cause of development.

A government's budget represents a statement of its priorities. During the past 25 years, the international community has recognized that gender equality is essential for sustainable economic growth and full social development, and it has called upon nations to use their budgets to promote genderequitable resource allocation and revenue generation. More than 60 countries have answered this call by implementing gender-responsive budgets at the national and subnational levels. However, gender-responsive budgeting is virtually unheard of among public finance scholars and U.S. public administration scholars and practitioners. Here we define gender-responsive budgeting, discuss the need for it, describe the lessons learned, and discuss its potential as a budget reform. We hope our commentary will bring gender-responsive budgeting into the mainstream of research in the U.S. public administration community and into the practice of government budgeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban sprawl has evolved into an exceptionally complex public policy problem in the United States over the course of recent decades. One factor that has made it particularly difficult to deal with is its relationship to the fragmented structure of the American system of land use governance. Acting on behalf of their residents, local governments enact land use regulations to secure lifestyle preferences for low density, suburban living environments while at the same time ensuring a high quality of public service provision. This article examines the effect of this process on metropolitan spatial structure through a series of econometric models designed to test the following hypothesis: that fragmentation promotes sprawl by increasing the proportion of growth that occurs at the unincorporated urban fringe. The estimation results reveal substantive evidence that municipal fragmentation and several related factors - including special districts, infrastructure investments, and white flight processes - have a significant and enduring effect on the growth of outlying areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of link of state employment and training and economic development programs in the United States. Effectiveness of state economic development programs is contingent on successful coordination of traditional physical capital and human capital improvement activities. The major stimulant to better linkages has been the growing perception that the movement of physical capital is heavily influenced by the skills and educational levels of the potential workforce. The article focuses on examination of the degree to which states have attempted to link physical and human capital development programs and to explore the correlates of these state efforts. The study explores the political, socioeconomic, and programmatic correlates of state organizational efforts. The results show that states which have forged the closest linkages are those which are confronted by declining economies despite extensive state fiscal incentives in support of the private sector and in which governors have fewer constraints on their powers to impose organizational changes.

This article presents news related to public administration in the U.S., as of April 2001. The rapid proliferation of federally sponsored programs to assist communities in many ways has been accompanied by administrative confusion in Washington and in the communities being helped. The article examines problems of community planning and development. If there is to be a single system of coordination at the community level, embracing the multicounty organizations for non-metropolitan areas and the model cities mechanism for urban programs, then there must be a single point of leadership and coordination in the federal government. The inability of state governments to assume their necessary role in the solution of national problems must itself be recognized as a national problem, and one that must be approached and solved through national action like any other national problem. The article also presents comments on the reorganization plan of 1970 proposed by U.S. President Richard Nixon. Reorganization plan has the merit of ending a prolonged and costly inertia in the development of the presidential office.

This article seeks to explore the validity of the assumptions used by Congress and the Executive Branch in setting organizational criteria to be met by nationally subsidized local and regional nonfederal agencies. Multicounty economic development districts are specifically considered to test the proposition that variations in scale, treated as neutral in designing these units, can have negative effects for both the ability of certain local groups to have their interests represented in district policy and for the implementation of national goals through district programs. The data that are available and inferences which can be drawn from them support the hypothesis. Consequently, if predictable and successful national- local organizational linkages are to be established, efforts are needed to produce an explicit set of testable propositions about the interrelationship of organizational scale, structure, and behavior at the subnational level to performance in the achievement of federally defined values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]