LOCAL REACTIONS TO THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: WHAT INFLUENCE OF NATIONAL CONTEXT VS INDIVIDUAL STRATEGIES? : A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON THE EFFECT OF THE 2008 CRISIS ON FRENCH AND ITALIAN MUNICIPALITIES

International audienceThe 2008 crisis has damaged or weakened most European Local Governments (LGs)’ financial situation. The shock has been more or less intense depending on the national context and policies, and on individual situations and strategies. After the crisis, different and successive types of recovery plans, austerity measures, and institutional reforms have been implemented by States, with several diverse effects on LGs’ situation. The previous situation of LGs in terms of financial autonomy, State protection or local responsibilities and actions also influenced their post crisis situation, not to mention the provision of bankruptcy in certain nations. At the individual level, depending on their size and capacities, LGs followed different strategies to cope with the crisis and the decrease in public resources. Taking a short or longer term perspective, LGs have had various options, from brutal cost cuts to more elaborated restructuring of their actions and missions even by outsourcing, from basic fiscal leverage to new strategies for enhancing revenues. In order to study the influence of both national and individual characteristics, this paper proposes a quantitative comparative study, based on a unique database of French and Italian LGs financial data, from 2006 to 2014, where financial data have been reclassified according to recent developments in the field (CEFG Group, 2015). It provides some descriptive statistics and mean comparisons of the evolution of key financial indicators from 2006 to 2014: global revenues, operating balance, part of tax resources in global revenues, level and cost of debt, level of operating expenses and personnel costs, level of investment expenses. The study focus on municipalities between 50 000 and 1 million inhabitants (122 municipalities in France, 145 in Italy)