The Capacities and Sustainability of Croatian Cities in Performing Municipal Services

The system of local and regional self-governments in the EU is characterized by an extremely large number of small units. The situation in Croatia, a country with only 3.87 million inhabitants, is no different. There are 576 local and regional self-government units. The basic feature of self-government in Croatia is the equal scope of authority in performing tasks, regardless of the number of inhabitants, the area they inhabit, or their ability to pursue sustainability objectives. In this paper, we analyze the capacities of performing municipal services in 127 Croatian cities and examine whether cities differ in their ability to perform public functions. Results show that cities can be grouped into three different clusters. The validity of the results on clusters was confirmed with an ANOVA, where a significant difference was found between all three clusters. Ranking cities according to the capacity for providing municipal services shows that cities with higher capacities are clustered together, implying that cities indeed differ in their ability to perform municipal services. Further, the results indicate that 80 percent of the cities belong to the cluster that consists of cities with a very low capacity for providing public services.