Posted on 06/20/2002 1:05:52 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
A little-noticed news item from Argentina tells us that two major provinces in that crisis-ridden country may soon merge in order to manage their funds more efficiently. I wonder whether this wouldn't be a great idea for many countries that are maintaining costly -- and often overlapping -- provincial governments.
Does it make sense for Argentina, a bankrupt country that had to suspend its foreign debt payments in January, to maintain -- in addition to its 10,000-employee federal Congress -- 24 provincial chambers of deputies and 24 provincial Senates that together employ tens of thousands of workers?
Does it make sense for provinces to have hundreds of legislators, who in many cases make more than $3,000 a month each?
The governors of the southern Argentina provinces of Río Negro and Neuquén have decided it doesn't make sense, and signed an agreement Wednesday to start legal proceedings for a plebiscite to merge their two provinces.
Their ultimate goal is to enlist other Argentina provinces from the southern Argentine Patagonia region -- Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego -- and call the plebiscite next year.
The caretaker government of President Eduardo Duhalde supports the idea.
And according to Neuquén Gov. Jorge Sobisch, who has been championing the merger idea for several months, a majority of Patagonians will support the plan.
Part of the Patagonian initiative has to do with the dramatic changes Argentina has gone through in recent months.
For the first time in many years, southern provinces are finding themselves paying taxes to support the province of Buenos Aires, until recently by far the richest and most politically powerful in Argentina.
BIGGEST PROBLEM
Nowadays, the Buenos Aires province accounts for 52 percent of the country's deficit and is Argentina's biggest financial problem.
In addition to saving costs and creating a united front to negotiate their tax bills with the federal government, many of the Patagonian provinces would break their geographic isolation by gaining access to neighboring Chile or to the Atlantic Ocean, supporters of the plan say.
''It's a good idea,'' says Rosendo Fraga, a well-known political analyst in Argentina. ``It's not new, but the Argentine crisis has precipitated provinces to act on ideas that have been around for years, but had never been set in motion.''
According to Fraga's New Majority Studies Center, Argentina's 24 provincial legislatures have a total of 247 senators and nearly 1,000 Congress members.
While some legislatures have cut back their legislatures' payroll in recent months, they employed a total of 50,000 workers last year. In some provinces such as Chaco, each state legislator has an average of 46 staffers, the Center says.
OTHER COUNTRIES
Merging provinces wouldn't be a bad idea for other countries, too.
Does it make sense for Mexico to have 32 states, some of which are so small that you have trouble finding them on the map, and which were often created to accommodate some political leader's ego? The western state of Colima, for instance, accounts for only 0.3 percent of Mexico's territory, yet has a state legislature and a full-blown government bureaucracy.
Is it smart for Ecuador to have 22 states, including two that have been created during the past five years?
Can the country afford to have 22 state government bureaucracies?
Should the Dominican Republic keep its current political structure of 29 provinces and a federal district? Should Guatemala, a country smaller than Tennessee, keep its 22 states, with their respective bureaucracies?
RECENT STUDIES
Granted, recent studies by the Inter-American Development Bank and other international financial institutions have shown that local governments are often more efficient managers of public funds than central governments.
When it comes to managing schools and hospitals, local officials who are under close scrutiny from their neighbors tend to be more dedicated and less corrupt than anonymous bureaucrats from far-away capitals.
Today, municipal governments in Latin America control more than 20 percent of their countries' public sector expenditures, and countries would be better off if that percentage rose, the IDB says.
In the United States and European democracies, municipal governments control about 35 percent of public spending.
But one idea doesn't invalidate the other.
You can merge several provinces and reduce costly state bureaucracies and allow municipalities to manage their schools and hospitals.
It's an idea worth trying.
The overall trend is to have an "efficient" elite ruling class, and remove the direct influence and representation of the peons.
If you really want to give those areas more of a say in Canadian affairs, the simplest way to do it would be to have an elected Senate.
It's one thing to eliminate bloated bureacracy.
Quite another to eliminate the local layer of government where representatives should be most responsive to the will of the people.
We see the ghastly tendency in our own government where pinheaded U.S. Congressional Representatives and Senators attempt to usurp the authority and function of local officials such as school boards.
Granted, there are certain government functions that are best addressed at a centralized/national level. However, there are many others that should remain strictly local. The power hungry bureacrats that crave micromanagement of local jurisdictions should have their buttocks exposed and flogged in public.
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