Government Consolidation Rarely Lives Up to Promises

The DeVoe L. Moore Center Blog

By Matt Kelly

Government consolidation is an often-touted solution to economic and social problems in American cities. Several initiatives to combine local governments  have resulted in conjoined regional governments, including Indianapolis-Marion County (IN), Athens-Clarke County (GA), and Jacksonville-Duval County (FL). Tallahassee and Leon County have seen six campaigns for consolidation over 50 years, all of which failed. Despite the sustained interest , little evidence in the economic or public policy research literature suggests local government consolidation improves economic development or governance.

Tallahassee’s history of consolidation attempts is lengthy but follows a national pattern of failure at the ballot box. Initial political pressure arose in the 1950s. A 1968 proposal was defeated by voter referendum, as were others in 1973, 1976, and 1992. A more recent campaign in 2004 never got a vote. This pattern is fairly common. Since 1815, only 39 of 166 attempted consolidations in the U.S. nationwide…

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Economic Freedom Key to Cities’ Success

The DeVoe L. Moore Center Blog

By Matt Kelly

Economic freedom is the unrestricted ability of people in a country to associate and transact with one another. Measuring economic freedom has become a growing area of academic research. Probably the best known measure is the index constructed for the “Economic Freedom of the World”  annual report on 159 countries published by the Fraser Institute and authored by Florida State University’s James Gwartney, Southern Methodist University’s Robert Lawson, and West Virginia University’s Joshua C. Hall. Other indices compare US states, like Cato’s Freedom in the Fifty States ranking. More recently, Dean Stansel of Southern Methodist University created a measure of economic freedom for US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). Stansel’s index ranks many Florida cities among the nation’s freest.

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Regulators Adapt to the Sharing Economy

The DeVoe L. Moore Center Blog

By Matt Kelly

The so-called “sharing economy” has revolutionized the way people travel, lodge, eat, and workthroughcompaniessuchasUber,Lyft, Airbnb,and OpenTable. Buyers and sellers are increasingly transacting on online platforms that use a mix of demand pricing, reputation mechanisms, and computer algorithms to match users. This innovation represents a dramatic challenge to regulators, whose enforcement framework is designed for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. Some jurisdictions have been accommodating, while others have cracked down.

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Study Finds Growth Management Laws Reduce Housing Affordability

The DeVoe L. Moore Center Blog

by Matt Kelly

A new study by Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole explores the history and effects of growth management in the United States. Growth-management laws, according to O’Toole, “restrict rural development in order to force most growth into the cities.” In “The New Feudalism: Why States Must Repeal Growth-Management Laws” O’Toole finds these laws increase housing prices, exacerbate price volatility, disproportionately harm minorities, and reduce national GDP by as much as 10 percent. The author concludes that states should repeal existing growth-management laws.

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The Per Business Regulatory Burden: Ranking Florida’s Local Governments

The DeVoe L. Moore Center Blog

By Matt Kelly and Tyler Worthington

The dramatic increase in federal government regulation has been well documented by economists and journalists, as has its detrimental effects on economic growth. The DeVoe Moore Center has constructed assorted measures of state and local regulatory restrictiveness. This article focused on revenues collected per business on the local level as a measure of relative regulatory burden (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Ranking Florida’s local governments: local regulatory fees and taxes. (Sources: Data from the Florida Department of Revenue and the US Census Bureau.)

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