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This paper explores how global pandemic crises affect the financial vulnerability of municipalities.

This paper is developed from the relevant literature an analytical framework to examine municipal financial vulnerability before a global pandemic crisis and in its immediate aftermath by mapping and systematizing its dimensions and sources. To illustrate how it can be used and evaluate its robustness and flexibility, such a tool was applied to Portugal and Italy, two countries that particularly suffered from the Covid-19 crisis.

The application of the analytical framework has shown how financially vulnerable municipalities are to global pandemic crises. Financial vulnerability relates to issues ranging from institutional design to internal financial conditions and the perception of the capacity to cope with a crisis. Results further reveal that vulnerability has an inherent contingent nature in time and space and can lead to paradoxical outcomes.

This paper provides a tool that can be useful for both academic and public policy purposes, to further appreciate municipal financial vulnerability, especially during crises.

Municipalities can use the framework to better manage their financial vulnerability, strengthening their anticipatory and copying capacities, while oversight authorities can use it to help municipalities become less financially vulnerable or, at least, more aware of their financial vulnerability.

Municipal financial vulnerability to global shocks has not been explored extensively. Also, the Covid-19 pandemic is different from previous global crises as it affected society overnight with the implementation of lockdown and social distancing measures.

Considering the increased financial responsibility of local government (LG), the impact of global crises and the growing adoption of accrual accounting and common standards such as IPSAS, this work focuses on financial indicators for LGs. It explores whether the literature on financial indicators has grown, investigates whether there is any consensus on which indicators to use for assessing LG's financial condition, develops a critical reading of the literature and offers suggestions for future research and policy agendas.

A structured literature review was carried out for publications in English about LG financial indicators.

Results reveal that the number of publications dealing with financial indicators has increased over the past ten years. However, rather than focusing on a set of common indicators, the literature reports a plethora of different ones used for four main purposes: transparency and accountability compliance, performance monitoring and benchmarking, assessing LG's financial health and helping deal with exogenous crises. There is no evidence of convergence towards a common set of indicators, even though liquidity and solvency are the most popular dimensions explored by scholars.

Findings highlight the challenges in converging on financial indicators, yet no claim can be made beyond the reviewed material.

Results provide legislators, public managers, investors and rating agencies with insights about trends in financial indicators, their benefits and limitations.

The article focuses on a less popular aspect of recent financial management reforms for local administration, that is the growing fragmentation in LG indicators, accentuated by the need for common assessment tools during unprecedented widespread crises across countries and sectors.

Coproduction is both a recurrent way of organizing public services and a maturing academic field. The academic debate has analyzed several facets, but one deserves further analysis: its impact on the cost efficiency of public services. The purpose of this paper is to aim at systematizing the findings on the relationship between coproduction and cost efficiency and at developing insights for future research.

This paper is based on a structured literature review (SLR), following the approach proposed by Massaro, Dumay and Guthrie. The SLR approach differs from traditional narrative reviews since, like other meta-analysis methods, it adopts a replicable and transparent process. At the same time, when compared to most common meta-analysis or systematic review logics, it is better suited to incorporate evidence from case studies and etnographies. This makes the method especially suited to public administration and management studies.

Results shed light on the nature of the academic literature relating coproduction to cost efficiency, on what type of costs are affected and how and on the meaningfulness of productivity measures when public services are co-produced.

In times of fiscal distress for many governments, the paper contributes to research and practice in systematically re-assessing the effects of coproduction on public budgets.

This paper aims to set out the case for integrated reporting (IR) and its potential to lead to change in the public sector by examining it in practice and analyzing the challenges associated with its implementation.

The paper investigates the role of IR in the public sector through the development of a theoretical framework applied to a case study focused on the University of Udine in Italy.

IR can be considered more as an incremental than a groundbreaking transformation of existing arrangements and approaches. The analysis revealed that the vagueness, complexity and intrinsic discrepancy between the IR concept and its operationalization brought the University of Udine to challenge and debate the IR approach and ultimately, to reconceptualize and implement its own version that better fitted its strategic aims, its intended audience and its status as a public entity.

The application of the findings to other contexts should be further investigated, while the analytical framework should be applied to different settings and could be enriched to add knowledge and sharpen the paradigms of integrated thinking and value co-creation. Moreover, the interviews focused on people directly involved in the preparation of the integrated report, excluding other stakeholders. Further research could explore their perceptions of IR and focus on their understanding of the IR as well as the value co-creation process.

The findings provide decision makers with insights about how IR can be promoted to enhance its impact on value co-creation. The key processes to be considered for a public organization are integrated thinking and value co-creation, while the key aspects to be investigated in an integrated report for the public sector are materiality and stakeholder engagement. Yet, the IR framework is missing indications on how to account for stakeholders' inputs, outputs and outcomes in a value co-creation process, which is fundamental in a public service logic.

The results shed further light on two fundamental phenomena in the public sector, namely, integrated thinking and value co-creation. The paper also answers the call for more empirical research on IR's rhetoric and practice and on its concrete role in the value creation process.

Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) has been increasingly adopted worldwide to tackle issues of size and cost reduction in the provision of public services. Although the determinants of cooperation among municipalities have been widely investigated in the prior literature, little is known about the link between a municipality's financial health and that of the supra-municipal entity formed under IMC. The purpose of this study is to fill this research gap by analyzing the case of municipal unions (MUs) in Italy.

A quantitative approach has been used, applying OLS and quantile regression on financial information and other variables of municipalities and their MUs.

The study finds that the most important condition of operation for IMC, that is, financial sustainability, is directly linked to the financial health of member municipalities and the functional integration reached with the supra-municipal entity.

The study analyses all MUs in Italy, focusing on the factors affecting their financial sustainability. In doing so, it sheds light on the factors that influence the financial sustainability of second-tier governments, which rely on external funding.