Off budget financing of municipal tasks with focus on municipal bonds

Abstract

The main purpose of the work was to present off-budget methods of financing municipal investments with focus on municipal bonds. As for investment risk assessment, municipal bonds are considered the safest securities, resulting from the public-law status of a local government unit. An essential attribute of a municipal issuer is that a local government unit cannot go bankrupt. The research was conducted in 2017, and the primary research tool was a questionnaire sent to 606 rural communes that are members of the Union of Rural Municipalities (Polish abbrev. ZGW). One hundred thirty-two questionnaires were received in response from rural communes located in all voivodships. The conducted survey showed that the essential source of extra-budgetary financing for municipalities is EU subsidies as well as loans and credits. Over 60% of the surveyed do not use municipal bonds because they do not know such a financial instrument and are afraid of the municipality’s excessive debt. It seems that important reasons for this are the caution and reluctance to use instruments that are not well known.