THE ENIGMA OF INTER-MUNICIPAL ENTERPRISES - Towards transnational legal principles on corporatization by local governments. (R-13375)

It's a global trend that cities strongly rely on inter-municipal cooperation to perform local government tasks. An increasingly popular cooperation method among cities is to use corporatization: creating publicly (or mixed publicly-privately) owned private-law companies to jointly fulfil tasks. Scandals show that when cities cooperate through corporatization, they set up non-transparent structures that deal with matters far from their core task without much political control. These opaque inter-municipal enterprises operating in multimillion-euro-businesses lack legal clarity, since ambiguity arises on their legal position from a public-law perspective (e.g. on financial supervision) and private law perspective (e.g. on the application of competition law). While legal research on public-law based inter-municipal associations is already rare, research into the use of private-law based entities (i.e. inter-municipal corporatization), is almost non-existent. This project aims to evaluate and - where necessary - optimize the corporatization of inter-municipal enterprises by local governments. This outcome is pursued by 1) the unique conceptualization & comparison of inter-municipal enterprises in Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK, 2) the legal & empirical evaluation of inter-municipal corporatization, and 3) the establishment of recommendations & transnational legal principles. The results hold the potential to be transposed to other state-owned private law entities in general.

Keywords:Corporatization, Inter-municipal cooperation, Public-private law divide

Disciplines:Administrative law, Comparative law, Economic, commercial and financial law, European law, Public administration organisations