Overview and Perspective of Voluntary Municipal Associations

The Czech Republic has very fragmented structure of public administration. The structure of municipalities according to their size shows that vast majority of municipalities have less than 1,000 inhabitants. This factor significantly affects the financing of their activities, because it is an important principle for allocation of shared taxes. Revenues of municipalities limit their management and provision of services for citizens. This can be solved by establishing voluntary municipal associations (VMAs) as one of the possible forms of municipal cooperation. The main goal of this paper is to describe voluntary municipal associations in the Czech regions and seek to scope a research agenda on VMAs by identifying data sources that can reveal the extent of VMAs in the Czech Republic. Partial objective is to point out potential problems in data reporting, which makes VMAs analysis difficult. The results of preliminary research demonstrate a variety of region approaches to collecting data on VMAs.