TY - JOUR AU - Reiljan, Janno AU - Ülper, Aivo PY - 2012/01/17 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - The necessity of an administrative-territorial reform in a country: the case of Estonia. Administratiiv-territoriaalse reformi vajadus riigis: Eesti juhtum JF - Estonian Discussions on Economic Policy JA - TPEP VL - 19 IS - 1 SE - Articles. Artikeln. Artiklid DO - 10.15157/tpep.v19i1.434 UR - https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/TPEP/article/view/434 SP - AB - The goal of this paper is to analyze the theoretical, political and organizational basesof the territorial division of the country into municipalities as well as empirical dataof Estonian municipalities and offer a research direction for identifying conceptualsolutions to the development problems in Estonian municipalities. The analysis ofthe theoretical approaches to municipal size pointed out that they are fragmented andincompatible. Some authors support small municipalities, and others large. Thetheoretical reasoning of both those directions is often strongly simplified and biasedand a unified metatheoretical approach has not been established. The empiricalanalysis revealed that there is no empirical evidence to confirm either the presenceof significant size related advantages among municipalities or the existence of anoptimal municipal size considering current municipal functions and financing. Thelack of theoretical and empirical evidence on the necessity for administrativeterritorialreform means that merging municipalities alone cannot significantlyimprove the public service delivery capacities and economic and democraticdevelopment of Estonian municipalities and that future studies should focus onanalyzing public services from the perspective of their economic efficiency, qualityand accessibility, and in doing so, determine the optimal size of regions forproviding the various public services. ER -