Descripció
The Spanish local government system is highly fragmented, with a large number of territorial entities. The responsibilities of a municipality vary according to the population. All municipalities are supposed to provide essential services, and the law establishes a scale of services which may be compulsory depending on the number of inhabitants of each municipality. The range of options of service delivery includes forms of in-house delivery, contracting out, but also corporatised (which includes a set of different juridical structures), and inter-municipal or multi-level cooperation tools. The main aims of this chapter are to present the structure of municipal public services, to analyse the range of delivery modes and to explore the extent of use of the options of delivery in the set of municipal services.
