City-County Consolidation: Practitioners’ and Academics’ Views

Improved economic development is becoming the primary argument advanced to support city-county consolidation. So what is the evidence that consolidation will bring greater economic growth? We start with information gleaned from our interviews with economic-development practitioners and professionals around the country, then turn to the empirical academic literature. Finally, we propose our synthesis of reasons that economic development might be expected to improve with city-county consolidation. Economic-development officials and professionals we interviewed generally support city-county consolidation. We found that, in counties where consolidation had taken place, opinions about consolidation’s effects on economic development ranged from mildly positive to overwhelmingly positive.