Modes of Public Serivces Delivery The Case of Spanish Local Governments

Abstract

In the last decades, there has been a spectacular increase in the number of entities providing public services in Spain. Functional decentralisation and externalisation processes became relevant and they made it possible to modernise the Spanish public sector, which was out of touch with new ideas in the rest of the Europe. In this study, we expose the evolution of these processes from 1999 to 2010, through a qualitative analysis using the biplot technique. The results show a trend toward functional decentralisation that is more important in the largest cities, especially through the creation of public companies and autonomous organisations.