Revenue and Spending Patterns of Georgia Cities Operating Public Utilities

What is it about?

Although public owned enterprises have rarely received the attention of the American public, their presence across the nation is widespread and their role in governance fundamental. These business-type activities, which are financed through user charges and fees, represent a great potential revenue source for municipalities as they often generate revenues beyond their costs. This paper examines longitudinally how public enterprises affect governmental spending and revenue patterns by analyzing a panel dataset of 100 Georgia cities between 2005 and 2009. This study used two-step GMM regression (2SGMM) and robust standard errors to estimate the relationship between dependent and independent variables. The findings of this research suggest that net enterprise transfers increase own-source revenues (additive effect) but decrease governmental expenditures (siphoning effect) contradicting findings from earlier studies.

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