District as a Determinant of the Evaluation of Municipalities' Economy?

摘要

The economy of municipalities in the Slovak Republic is regulated by the Act on Budgetary Rules for the Self-Governing Territorial Units which evaluates the management of municipalities according to a sole criterion; that is the indebtedness of the municipality. The aim of the article is to propose an alternative to the legal perspective on the evaluation of the municipality economy. The article characterizes the TOPSIS technique as a possibly appropriate alternative to the complex evaluation for municipality economy as the basic unit of the self-government. This technique is applied to the sample of 661 municipalities in the Presov Self-Governing Region focusing on the influence of inclusion or non-inclusion of municipalities into districts on the overall result. The aim of the article is to create a ranking of municipalities with the best economy according to selected criteria on two levels identified. Results of this application are further statistically studied concentrating on the identification of the monitored correlations and differences in the economy.