The study, published in the journal Public Management Review and based on data from Catalonia between 2012 and 2022, was led by Professor Germà Bel, from the Department of Econometrics, Statistics and Applied Economics at the University of Barcelona. It analyses how the shared organization of social services has - or has not - translated into better outcomes for low-income families.
The study, which received funding from the Institute for Self-Government Studies , has deliberately positioned itself in the classic debate on the architecture of local services, between municipal mergers and horizontal cooperation, and has chosen to examine the latter not from the point of view of costs, but in terms of its real effects on collective well-being. Within this framework, the authors have focused their analysis on two indicators directly linked to poverty: guaranteed citizen income and rental assistance, two benefits with very different institutional designs and administrative logics.
From an epistemological perspective, the study has been included in the literature on community-based outcomes, which proposes measuring the success of public policies not so much by their internal efficiency, but by the changes they generate in the living conditions of a community. This approach has involved a significant shift: from asking whether a service works well to asking whether it has effectively reduced social vulnerability in the territory, an issue that has become increasingly central to the contemporary evaluation of social policies.
To carry out the analysis, researchers worked with an extensive database on Catalan municipalities, organized according to basic social service areas, which connected town councils, regional councils and the Government of Catalonia in the provision of local services. Over time, the study has compared what has happened in areas where cooperation has been strengthened and what has happened in those where it has not, tracking the evolution of the same areas before and after organizational changes and attempting to isolate the specific effect of working together.
The results have revealed a clear pattern. Inter-municipal cooperation has not significantly altered the coverage of guaranteed citizen income, but it has clearly and statistically significantly increased the scope of rental assistance. In relative terms, increased cooperation has been associated with an increase of approximately one-third in the average proportion of beneficiary households, a difference that has had a real impact on families' ability to maintain access to housing.
