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Best paper, PAQ 2022

Congratulations to Barbara Patrick and Aaron C. Rollins on the selection of their paper, "Delivering Culturally Competent and Equitable Police Services Via Social Media: Assessing Two Way Dialogue between Police Agencies and Vulnerable Citizens" as the best paper published by PAQ in 2022. We are pleased to make this scholarship freely available here.

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call for papers: nonprofit management for social change

ASPA's Section on Nonprofit Management has issued a call for papers for a symposium to explore how nonprofit and philanthropic research and practice might embrace its interdisciplinarity by developing theories and methodological approaches to challenge traditional ways of understanding and address wicked problems facing communities today. We invite you to submit original manuscripts on methodological approaches to nonprofit and philanthropic studies that embrace interdisciplinarity in a number of ways. Please see the attached for more details.

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PAQ Articles

single article: New South Wales State Government Failure? An Empirical Analysis of the Cootamundra Gundagai Regional Council Forced Merger

Brian Dollery and Joseph Drew
PAQ, Vol. 47 No. 2, 200-222 (2023)
https://doi.org/10.37808/paq.47.2.6

Summary at a Glance: Under the NSW Government’s forced amalgamation program, the Cootamundra and Gundagai councils were merged in 2016. This paper examines the outcomes of the amalgamation by comparing the estimated outcomes prepared by NSW Government agencies and KPMG with the actual outcomes after four years post-merger. It demonstrates that the merger has failed on almost all counts.
Abstract: As part of the controversial local government structural reform program in NSW, the Cootamundra and Gundagai shire councils were forcibly amalgamated into the Cootamundra Gundagai Regional Council (CGRC) in 2016. Various documents and commissioned reports prepared by NSW government agencies, commercial consultants KPMG and the NSW Boundaries Commission Delegate all claimed that significant cost savings and other financial benefits would flow from the consolidated CGRC. Using data from the four post-merger financial years, in this paper we examine these claims against observed financial and operational efficiency outcomes at the CGRC. Three different analyses are conducted: aggregate accounting measures are examined, financial ratio analysis is used for performance comparison, and operational efficiency is estimated through Data Envelopment Analysis. All three analyses decisively demonstrate that the CGRC has not only failed to reap the claimed cost savings and other financial benefits, but its fiscal performance has deteriorated sharply. In sum, the CGRC represents a clear case of NSW state government policy failure.

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