The paper analyzes the experience of structural transformation of local self-government. The research shows that the reform of local self-governance is aimed at reducing the total number and consolidation of municipal entities in the absence of a universally recognized methodology for assessing the consequences of such consolidation. The aim of the work is to substantiate the methodological approach to the quantitative assessment of the municipalities’ consolidation effects. The information base of the study is official data of the State Statistics Service; theories and problems of local self-government development expressed in the works of foreign and Russian scientists. We use the methods of sampling, grouping, generalization and comparison, structural-functional analysis and synthesis, various methods of data visualization to describe the local government structure and justify the local effects of municipal consolidation. We consider the approaches to the assessment of economic and social consequences of municipal consolidation in Russia and abroad. The article proves that the merger of municipalities cannot be guided only by economic parameters, as the social goals of local government – provision of municipal services and increasing social activity within the boundaries of municipalities – should also be taken into account. We have revealed that the consolidation of municipalities is often initiated by state authorities taking into account only qualitative parameters, without an appropriate quantitative assessment of socio-economic effects of this process in the Russian Federation, as well as abroad. We propose and verify a methodological approach to measuring the local socio-economic effects of municipal consolidation on the example of the Okhotsk municipal district of the Khabarovsk Territory, which takes into account both qualitative (social) and quantitative (economic) parameters of local government dynamics; this measure helps to more consciously justify the potential results of the process of municipal mergers. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the substantiation of theoretical and practice-oriented proposals to improve the quantitative assessment of the process of municipal consolidation in the course of the local self-government reform in Russia
Keywords
Municipal consolidation, municipal development, evaluation of the municipal consolidation effects