Page 21 - 21211_fulltext

การประหยัดจากขนาดในองค์กรปกครองส่วนท้องถิ่น
และวิเคราะห์ศักยภาพการควบรวมท้องถิ่นขนาดเล็ก

1000population are investigated and they follow the pattern of
“decreasing cost”; beyond 10000 population, the unit costs tend to
increase along with local scale of operation. It should worth mentioning
that we do not conclude that this is “optimal” – that the minimum cost
is a view from supply side alone—it is as well important to consider the
demand side (the user of local services) and hence, we should consider
the effects from demanders which inclusive of social acceptance,
transaction costs, travelling cost and time.
Second, another way of perceiving “diseconomies-of-scale” in
small-sized municipalities and subdistrict administration is clearly
evidenced when we explore the relationship between cost and local
employment. This refers to the local employment policy which specifies
the number of local officer and their position and the limit to hire
permanent- or temporary hired workers, and the limit to personnel
expense not exceeding 40% of local budget. These are viewed as “fixed
costs” to local administration, accordingly the unit cost of personnel
expense can be very high when the population size decreases.

Third, the quality of local public services is crucial and relevant to
our study, in this connection we collect the LPA data (local performance
assessment) from the Department of Local Administration (whose scores
range from 0 to 100). We found that the LPA in the large-sized local
units tend to be significantly higher than the small-sized local units, and
it may be interpreted that: i) the local public services among the small-
sized units tend to be incompleted and some functions were neglected;
ii) the activities or public services by the small-sized units may be not as
frequent as in the large-sized. And these may be related to financial
capabilities or the small-number of people participation. These might
have led to an attitude that it is not worth to perform such activities or
that people do not demand for such as such functions. For instance, the
subdistrict administration rarely perform garbage collection and they
tend to perceive that “local peoples can help themselves”—in reality
there are numerous evidences that garbage from rural area are disposed
in the nearby municipalities.

XX สถาบันพระปกเกล้า