Urban Alternatives: Public and Private Markets in the Provision of Local Services (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies)

By Robert M. Stein

In this study, Robert Stein asks whether the way cities are organized affects how well they provide services for their residents. He weighs the small and large organizational choices every local government makes - from its paper flow and chain-of-command to its funding sources and contracting arrangements - against the real end results of services for citizens: sanitation, transportation, public safety and education. Though the organizational structure of local governments has often been studied, researchers until now have relatively ignored the relationship between a city's organization and its actual performance.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822936518
• ISBN13: 9780822936510
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive research on urban management and public policy

Robert Stein (Rice University Professor of Political Science) has written a comprehensive study of how municipalities deliver their various public services and what difference does this variation imply for urban public policy. Stein grounds his study thoroughly in theory: Cities must provide services, not all citizens use these services but must contribute to the financing of these services through taxation; this generates an incentive for those who can afford to do so to move out of the city's borders, leaving behind an increasingly dependent population; this will eventually hurt the very fiscal capacity of the city to provide said services: a true urban dilemma. Stein argues that alternative service delivery, services delivered to citizens through a variety of organizational structures, allows cities with more extensive service commitments to meet their service delivery responsibilities while maintaining and adequate balance between their social function and their fiscal or economic function. Stein adopts a rigorously empirical approach, employing a variety of data sources, but primarily relying on an International City Managers Association survey and Census Bureau data. Stein finds that, indeed the organizational structure of urban service delivery matters for the fiscal performance of municipalities. Alternative service delivery will, in general, reduce expenditures, lower employment rates and reduce wage rates for municipal governments. The primary mechanism for this is the lower benefit and wage packages offered to workers by non-municipal service providers. Stein concludes that these mechanisms offer municipalities a method for continuing to deliver public services even when these services conspire against their fiscal well-being. Stein makes a real contribution to our knowledge of urban management and policy in this study. This is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the future of American cities. However, the methodological and theoretcial sophistication of the tome will prevent a wider audience. The exhaustive quantitative aspect of the study at times threaten to overwhelm the reader. Further, the theoretical arguments are such that the book could be troublesome for use in all except the most advanced undergraduate courses. Graduate courses in urban policy, however, should benefit greatly from this book. Finally, a minor criticism: the index is a bit less detailed that that called for by such an incisive and in-depth contribution.