Özet:

The scale economy thesis is one of the leading motives of the reforms that seek more economic local public services on the basis of the local government size. In case of the existence of scale economies, average costs of the output can be reduced by means of increasing the inputs in a concrete local service’s production as long as optimal size of service area isn’t exceeded. However, the usage of the scale economy thesis in the literature of local government isn’t grounded over this scenario. It is built through the expectation of saving on the costs by means of increasing local authority’s size as a geographical area or population. In other words, the scale economy which is a thesis substantially belonging to the theory of the firm is used in a decontextualized way in the area of local governments. With snatching the output from production and defining it via population, gains which arise from the size of local authority or service capacity are also called as scale gains. The first aim is being able to frame the concepts correctly. Secondly, it is emphasized that scale gains cannot be a valid approach for the whole range of local service and local government sizes. Providing findings of many field research, empirical evidences of the relationship between size and efficiency are also presented. These evidences show that the expectation of cost savings originating from the scale economy doesn’t correspond in all cases.

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