Introduzione

To achieve the conditions for an effective playing by Municipalities, especially the smaller ones, of the role of protecting the interests of the local community, Italian national and regional legislations have defined a framework of general principles and implementing rules that identifies in the most integrated inter-municipal cooperation, and even more in their merger, the objectives to be pursued and the processes to be supported for an overall territorial reorganization of the Republic. Merging represents the most radical and potentially most effective solution for the rationalization of the territory, services and functions performed by Municipalities. It has the potentiality to result in an increase in the qualitative and quantitative supply of local public services, in the face of potential savings in the bureaucratic costs related to the functioning of institutions, with beneficial effects on the tax and tariff level. The process of merging between local authorities finds its foundation in all the levels of legislation. This contribution does not intend to examine the regulatory sources affecting Municipalities’ merger, nor does it purport to outline the complex procedure to be implemented to establish new Municipalities, deriving from the merger of the existing ones. Limiting ourselves to remembering that since Law 142/1990 until law 56/2014, it has always been tried to favour the reduction of the number of Municipalities also through important facilitations including those of a financial nature, we look at these measures as being part of the logical framework of the structural containment of public spending and financial consolidation. Starting from what we have just mentioned, we will propose brief considerations, first of all, on the potentials and limits of the merger processes between Municipalities and, subsequently, on the semantics of the budget balance.