Evaluation of financial management of towns in relation to political cycles using CV-TOPSIS

Abstract

The political cycle and its impact of economy is usually monitored at the macroeconomic level. Nonetheless, abroad studies are emerging which analyzed the impact of the political cycle on economy on the level of territorial self-government. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the impact of the political cycle on the financial management of municipalities on a sample of 69 district towns in Slovak Republic in time period 2007-2017. The results point that to significant heterogeneity, whether at the level of individual towns or when comparing the results for individual years. As a result of the differences observed at the level of the political cycles, we analyzed the differences between the results in each year of each political cycle through CV-TOPSIS method. The financial management of the analyzed towns are very diverse and the increase of town's expenditures is not always linked to the political cycle.