Inter-municipal cooperation and the merger of municipalities are the basis of administrative-territorial reforms in Armenia, which began in 2015. The purpose of this study is to fi nd out how the reforms infl uenced the cooperation of municipalities, in particular, whether they helped to solve problems in the field of cooperation and more effectively organize this process. To answer these questions, we conducted a comparative analysis of inter-municipal cooperation in Armenia before and after the reforms. For these reasons, legislation regulating the cooperation of municipalities and data on inter-municipal authorities was explored. To assess the level of development of inter-municipal cooperation in Armenia compared with other post-Soviet countries, we studied the experience of inter-municipal cooperation of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine.
The analysis is based on the data obtained from the official website of the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Development of the Republic of Armenia, the books Local Government in Armenia, which are annually published by the Union of Municipal Financiers and the results of surveys and surveys conducted by Counterpart International in 2011 and 2014. Since inter-municipal cooperation is not well developed in the post-Soviet countries, we have collected the information about cooperation of municipalities in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine from scientific literature and from the official websites of the European Neighborhood Policy and the United Nations Development Program in Moldova.
Having studied the examples of inter-municipal cooperation in Armenia and main obstacles to their functioning, lack of funds and the imperfection of the legislative base, we can conclude that if changes in the legislative field regulate the activities of these structures, then with regard to financial issues, a systematic solution is required to increase the income of municipalities and to allocate these funds for their own powers.