Intermunicipal cooperation offers an interesting alternative in cases when municipalities are too small to individually provide public services at an efficient cost level but are reluctant to form a municipal amalgamation in order to benefit from economies of scale. Forming a body consisting of multiple municipalities with a specific focus provides a way to reduce costs on service provision while maintaining municipal sovereignty in other areas. In our paper, we quantify the cost benefits of utilizing intermunicipal cooperation in the field of municipal solid waste management. We examine this using data from a 10-year period from municipalities in the South Moravian Region in the Czech Republic, where high municipal fragmentation results in many dominantly small municipalities that often are not able to provide public services at reasonable costs. This analysis contributes to the literature by conducting a long-term study of the effects of intermunicipal cooperation on public service provision costs. Our results suggest that municipalities participating in intermunicipal cooperation focused on waste management experienced annual cost savings of approximately 13.5% for provision of this service throughout the examined period of 2010–2019 when compared to municipalities that did not cooperate. These long-term results show how beneficial intermunicipal cooperation can be in reducing service costs. In addition to the direct financial benefits, municipal representatives stated that intermunicipal cooperation often brings other qualitative and non-financial benefits such as better service quality, the possibility to share infrastructure, and relief from administrative and managerial burdens through the utilization of professional management, which was especially appreciated by the smallest municipalities with limited administrative staff.

Though participatory budgeting (PB) is often discussed as a tool to bolster the level of civic participation and the quality of democracy, empirical research on the subject offers ambiguous results. In the Czech Republic, PB was introduced 5 years ago, and the number of implemented PBs has since increased substantially. The purpose of this article is to evaluate whether the use of PB is associated with higher voter turnout in municipal and parliamentary elections. Voter turnout in Czech municipalities that implemented PB is analyzed and compared with the control group of municipalities without PB. Considered by type of election, we found that the impact of PB use on voter turnout is higher for local elections than it is for national elections, which is in line with our assumptions. However, our results were significant for Prague districts only. Participatory budgeting could increase voter turnout in local election, but there are other factors that must be considered.

Property tax autonomy of the Czech municipalities is quite narrow and to great extent unused. Perceived political costs of its usage are high and only 8% of municipalities utilized the possibility to increase the tax rates through so called local coefficient. Using the binary logit model and a full sample and two subsamples of Czech municipalities in 2014 the existence of tax mimicking is confirmed regardless the subsample of municipalities considered or the definition of neighbors applied. The likelihood to increase the local coefficient is to some extent influenced by the composition of the municipal council and local demographic, geographic and fiscal situation. However, the overall capacity of the model to indicate municipalities which apply local coefficient is low and suggests that there are many other or different situations or factors which result in application of local coefficient.

This article deals with the efficiency of the usual municipal expenditures on environmental protection and suggests a methodology for assessing...

The submitted paper proposes the possible use of integrated semi-quantitative risk assessment of groundwater resources. There are risks resulting from both natural and anthropogenic hazard sources. Activation of these types of hazard sources can cause damage to, or destruction of, particular hydrogeological structures and technological equipment of selected groundwater resources suitable for the emergency drinking water supply of the population. The process of risk assessment is based on the described register of hazards, including semi-quantitative assessment of the frequency with which the assessed sources of hazards are activated, the register of sensitivity together with the semi-quantitative sensitivity assessment of selected threatened elements of the assessed water resource and the determination of their criticality. The semi-quantitative risk assessment should become one of the important criteria for classifying groundwater resources which have been proposed for emergency water supply. The classification carried out on the basis of the above-mentioned principle can contribute to faster selection and effective use of groundwater resources, as well as to the enhancement of emergency and crisis planning systems when the public system is either damaged or destroyed.

The paper deals with the historical development of local self-government in the context of the development of the public administration as a whole during the First Czechoslovak Republic. It presents historical roots of the public administration in the former imperial Austria-Hungary, which was different from other European countries with its complex bureaucratic structures. Certain elements of the complex political and administrative developments during the early 20th century can be seen even one hundred years later. It is becoming apparent that history repeats itself in a number of issues and that it is unforgivable not to learn lessons both from the mistakes and the successful solutions of the past.