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In the last decades, there has been a spectacular increase in the number of entities providing public services in Spain. Functional decentralisation and externalisation processes became relevant and they made it possible to modernise the Spanish public sector, which was out of touch with new ideas in the rest of the Europe. In this study, we expose the evolution of these processes from 1999 to 2010, through a qualitative analysis using the biplot technique. The results show a trend toward functional decentralisation that is more important in the largest cities, especially through the creation of public companies and autonomous organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of this paper is to analyse the level of implementation by Spanish local authorities of the Transparency Act (19/2013), and their voluntary information disclosure in areas where such disclosure is obligatory in other EU countries. We identify the main factors that may influence the implementation of this Act and the self-regulation policies adopted. Our analysis highlights the existence of delays among some local authorities, with notable differences between municipalities with larger and smaller populations, in implementing the Act, and also the fact that many municipalities are committed to achieving transparency, often going beyond minimum legal requirements. Factors such as population size, the political ideology of the governing party and the education level and economic capacity of the population are related to the level of implementation of transparency and self-regulatory policies in this respect by local authorities. We acknowledge that the 2013 Act was still being implemented during the period analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increase in public services offered at the local level and heightened budgetary and financial constraints on local government, new ways of managing local public services must be sought, in order to maximize the efficiency of resource management. Accordingly, local governments have introduced organizational changes, through contracting out, the creation of public agencies, and increased cooperation with other municipalities and private companies. However, previous studies have only examined the relationship between contracting out and efficiency, and no in-depth survey has been made of the relationship between efficiency with other forms of management, nor of the joint impact of these forms of management on efficiency. The main aim of this study is to determine whether New Public Management (NPM) delivery forms do in fact improve the efficiency of Spanish local governments. In this regard, we analyze the particular impact of the global recession. Our results suggest that in general terms the creation of agencies, contracting out, and intermunicipal cooperation reduce cost efficiency. However, these results also lead to the conclusion that during the global recession, some of these NPM delivery forms tended to become more efficient. Thus, empirical evidence suggests that the adoption of mixed firms contributes to higher levels of cost efficiency in the whole period considered, and thus it may be a suitable instrument in periods of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]