Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview I. Working Group on Local Government Author(s) Iztok Rakar University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Benčina Jože, Klun Maja, Title Coping with financial Difficulties of Municipalities – A different Perspective File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Iztok Rakar Abstract As the recent Congress of Local and Regional Authorities draft report shows, the economic effects of the world financial crisis inspired more comprehensive administrative reforms in certain countries. Some of these reforms have used well-established methods for coping with financial difficulties and enhancing the efficiency of the financial management of the municipalities, the others introduced new mechanisms and technics. One of them could be described as »give-and-you-will-be-given«, which generally means that municipalities must adopt different measures in order to get financial support. This means that the focus of local finances moves from countries' duties to comply with international obligations, set in e.g. European Charter of Local-Self Government, to municipalities' efforts to contribute their own share in improving budgetary situation and delivering local public services in an efficient way. The main aim of the paper is to analyze the situation in Slovenia, where local finances are recurring issue and optimization of local public sector is one of the challenges, explicitely specified in the Strategy of Local Self-Government Development until 2020. In order to make international comparisons more accurate and results more useful, we will distinguish two types of activities: administrative taks (ger. Verwaltungsaufgaben; slov. upravne naloge) and services of general interest (ger. Leistungen der Daseinsvorsorge; slov. javne službe). As administrative tasks are concerned, there are several studies that have proven, that the main motive for establishing joint municipal administrations was not intrinsic in its nature, but extrinsic: it was the change of legislation, which provided state co-financing of their costs. Yet, there are no analysis of services of general interest. We will focus on public institutes (ger. öffentliche Anstalt; slo. javni zavod), which represent the main organizational form of providing local services of general non-economic interest (e.g. health, education, culture, social care, sport). In Slovenia, there are about 1,000 local public institutes in 212 municipalities. Our goals are to 1) analyze all the avaliable data on local public institutes and their finances, and to 2) assess possibility and consequences of abolishment of legal personality of smaller public institutes.
