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A somewhat horrifying account by Bruce Katz on the fractured state of jurisdictional / municipal / state government in the US - and I thought the balkanized nature of our local (Victoria BC) government was bad! Katz lays out the benefits (such as they are) that come with intense localism, but his analysis of the drawbacks (far more numerous) really makes the case for amalgamation:
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There are benefits associated with intense localism. Citizens feel a closer connection to their local officials (although does anyone really know the boundaries of their local library district?). And, in theory, individuals and firms can shop around for the government that most closely matches their preferred mix of efficiency, service and taxes.

Yet the drawbacks of fragmented governance far outweigh the benefits.

Fragmentation keeps government weak. With the landscape chopped into thousands of municipalities and special bodies, most local governments remain tiny, nearly amateur concerns, unequal to the widening challenges of global competition, suburbanization, revitalization and economic development.

Many states are bedeviled by what David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., has called a crazy quilt of "little box governments and limited horizons." In geographical terms, little boxes ensure that in almost every region scores of archaic boundaries artificially divide areas that otherwise represent single, interrelated social, economic and environmental communities. Such divisions complicate efforts to carry out cross-boundary visioning, plan cooperatively or coordinate decision-making across large areas.

At the same time, with the vast majority of municipalities essentially small towns, many if not most have limited tax bases and struggle to provide even the most basic services.

Little box governments create a problem of scale. More and more the geographical reach of local and metropolitan challenges exceeds the reach and capacity of its governmental machinery.

Second, fragmentation increases the cost of governmen

amalgamation wsj.com metros bruce_katz local_government governance

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The CIBCWM Metropolitan Economic Activity Index

Using 9 key macroeconomic variables, we have developed a metropolitan index of economic activity, which is structured in a way that approximates the change in each city's level of economic activity. With data going back for almost 10 years, our index enables us not only to monitor the current performance of a given city but also to track its cyclical behavior against the national economy and other census metropolitan areas (CMAs). The focus is on the 25 largest CMAs in Canada.

The macro variables used to develop the index are: (1) Population growth, (2) Employment growth, (3) Unemployment rate, (4) Full-time share in total employment, (5) Personal bankruptcy rate, (6) Business bankruptcy rate, (7) Housing starts, (8) MLS Housing resales, and (9) Non-Residential building permits. We combined all the above information into one index per city: "The CIBCWM Metropolitan Economic Activity Index"1.
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The link to the synopsis (Metro Monitor - Canadian Cities: An Economic Snapshot 12/17/08) is on this page (PDF) :
http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/metro_monitor.pdf (6 pages)

cibc canada metros census_metropolitan_areas economy world_markets markets