Testing Municipal Reinvention on the Price of Municipal Governance

Abstract

Municipal reinvention has been widely employed to improve government efficiency in many US municipalities; however, most of the efforts fail to test its efficiency. This study identifies which strategies of municipal reinvention have improved municipal performance by reducing the price of municipal governance. The data sources employed by this research are 1. 1997 ICMA Reinvention Government: Implementation at the Local Level; 2. the Census Bureau; and 3. the Office of Management and Budgeting, USA. By the zero-truncated negative binomial model, the findings do not support the contention that municipal reinvention decreases the price of municipal governance between mayor-council and council-manager cities. However, local conditions have a significant effect on the cost of the two forms of governments.