Economies of Scale and Sustainability in Local Government: A Complex Issue
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
In general, after reading the article, I cannot easily answer the following questions:
- What are the main conclusions of the article?
- What is the clear relationship or link between economies of scale and outsourcing?
- Do the authors present a roadmap to increase the efficiency of the local government and keep the sustainability in the medium-long term?
- What is the key performance indicator (KPI) to measure the improvement?
Author Response
Reviewer 1
I would like to thank the reviewer for his valuable comments. At several places I have added new text.
In general, after reading the article, I cannot easily answer the following questions:
- What are the main conclusions of the article?
Since this is an overview paper used as an introductory to a special issue, it is hard to present any clear conclusions. Nevertheless, a few conclusions are being mentioned in de Discussion section. In order to make them more visible or explicit I also included them in the abstract.
- What is the clear relationship or link between economies of scale and outsourcing?
This is being explained in the lines 121-130. I also included a few more lines to clarify this.
- Do the authors present a roadmap to increase the efficiency of the local government and keep the sustainability in the medium-long term?
The roadmap is presented in a rather implicit way. The special issue shows that there still are many knowledge gaps in this type of research. The framework presented in this paper can be of help to fill these gaps.
- What is the key performance indicator (KPI) to measure the improvement?
The KPI is efficiency. It is explained in lines 352-355 that in many cases efficiency and sustainability are not conflicting, on the contrary. In the cases they are, sustainable outcomes can be incorporated in the efficiency framework. The same analyses can be conducted on scale economies. It is just a matter of output measurement. This is explained in the text.
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper presents adequate scientific writing however some issues should be reviewed:
- The type of research/methodology adopted is not clear. There should be a section just for methodological options.
- Diagrams 1, 2, and 3 are of poor graphical quality. Would it not be possible to improve this?
- Considering the theme of the article, I believe that the work of researchers António Tavares and Pedro Camões would be an added value to the research.
Author Response
Reviewer 2
We would like to thank the referee for his comments.
(x) English language and style are fine/minor spell check required
We have conducted an extensive spell check.
The paper presents adequate scientific writing however some issues should be reviewed:
- The type of research/methodology adopted is not clear. There should be a section just for methodological options.
This is an overview paper used as an introductory to a special issue. We found in the literature various methods to conduct research on scale economies in local government. Most of these studies use regression methods, stochastic frontier approaches and Data Envelopment Analysis. We briefly discuss these methods in Section 3 without the technical details. In each of the contributions of the special issue methodologies are extensively discussed.
- Diagrams 1, 2, and 3 are of poor graphical quality. Would it not be possible to improve this?
Yes, we noticed this as well. We have resolved the problem.
- Considering the theme of the article, I believe that the work of researchers António Tavares and Pedro Camões would be an added value to the research.
Thank you for this suggestion. We are familiar with their interesting work, but to our knowledge their work focuses on the determinants of municipal cooperation. Their theoretical underpinning can be found in political economies/science, whereas the core of our research can be found in production economics. We could not find any reference that would fit well in our paper.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors of this article have presented a new issue of it, I can confirm that the most topics I mentioned in my first review are not covered, considered or taken into account.
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