Privatization and Cooperative Management in the Provision of Public Services in the Rural United States

Using results from previous studies in Illinois and Wisconsin, the authors attempt to model the municipal decision of how to provide residents town services. In order to test the applicability of past work to smaller towns, they conducted a survey of the mostly rural state of New Hampshire in the summer of 2004. In addition, they construct decision-making models using logit, probit, and Poisson techniques which examine the influence of population, location and other exogenous factors on the decision to privatize.