earticle

영어

The integration of local governments that reduces the number of municipalities in the country has long been discussed in the hope that it can increase synergy effects and deliver public services with enhanced efficiency. Possible effects associated with the mergers of more than two local governments have been addressed by many scholars, but there have been no agreements on the benefits and disadvantages of the integration. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the recent voluntary integration plans proposed by 46 local governments based on our empirical results which take into the spatial interaction account. The cluster analysis has been applied as a practical method to identify the local governments that have strong spatial interaction. The results show that the initial integration plans proposed by local governments in Gyung-gi Do are very similar to our empirical results but the plans by the other governments showed quite different integration patterns.