The measurement of local authorities’ financial condition – the international literature search query

Abstract

The assessment of local authorities’ financial condition is crucial to develop knowledge in the field of public finance, to identify mechanisms explaining the relations between particular components of local authorities’ financial condition, to determine potential ways of finance optimization and to meet the need for information of a broad group of stakeholders. The measurement of financial condition allows for the assessment of financial security understood as the ability to ensure the continuity in the implementation of basic own tasks and to maintain financial credibility related to the payment of current and future financial obligations. The aim of this article was to undertake a critical review of the definitions and methods to assess the financial condition of local authorities collected during the review of international literature. Various methods of measuring the financial condition of local authorities, which allow to carry out comparative studies and to determine the spatial trends of its assessment, were summarized in the article. The variety of financial condition depictions encountered in the literature depends on the purpose and adopted definition and also on the spatial extent and availability of statistical data. A common practice is to use the concept of measuring the financial condition proposed by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants or the International City/County Management Association. The analysis of international literature, complemented by the achievements of Polish authors, led to the identification of two basic approaches to measuring the financial condition of local authorities: 1) many empirical measures 2) composite index. The primary sector of interest in this article is the second approach, which adapts different methods of creating a multivariate index of financial condition (composite index), on the basis of which it is possible to relatively measure the level of the financial situation.