Development Agencies and Local Governments—Coexistence within the Same Territory
, Carmen Lili Rodríguez Velasco 3,4,5, Eduardo Silva Alvarado 3,4, Ruben Calderon Iglesias 4, Roberto Marcelo Álvarez 2,4 and Santos Gracia Villar 1,3,4
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Literature review needs to be fortified. The review of “Stability and Change in County Economic Development Organizations” from Economic Development Quarterly 2012. Also there work on institutional collective action (ICA) addresses the problem of fragmented authority for development. See the ICA essay in Policy Studies Journal 2013 and other works.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
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Reviewer 2 Report
The main problems of this paper are (in illative order):
1) there is no literature review, and the references are not cited in the text (except two of them)
2) Results are not analyzed in depth; p. 4 to 6 are devoted to describe the operations of LDA and 'local government' but without sources or evidence about it
3) The content of Discussion section is really not a discussion but some considerations about the Results context. It's interesting but: a) they must be exposed before Results section; b) they also fall short of sources/evidence.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
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Reviewer 3 Report
The discussed topic is interesting both for the readers at home and abroad. However, the presented text does not meet the requirements of the scientific text.
1. There is no clearly defined research goal or research questions.
2. The introduction is very poor and does not contain the required elements. As required by the journal: The introduction should briefly place the study in a broad context and highlight why it is important. It should define the purpose of the work and its significance, including specific hypotheses being tested. The current state of the research field should be reviewed carefully and key publications cited. Please highlight controversial and diverging hypotheses when necessary. Finally, briefly mention the main aim of the work and highlight the main conclusions. Keep the introduction comprehensible to scientists working outside the topic of the paper.
3. Methods
This section lacks the details and assumptions of the research carried out: what hypotheses were tested, what documents were tested and by what methods, details of the interviews (what was asked about, how the data was processed, whether coding was used, how many interviews were carried out, when). Methods should be described with sufficient detail to allow others to replicate and build on published results.
4. Results
The legend for the charts should be in English. Moreover, the presented data requires interpretation and confrontation with the assumptions of the article. In its current form, it is only a research report. The results of bibliographic research and research of documents are missing.
5. Discussion
Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible and limitations of the work highlighted. Future research directions may also be mentioned.
A discussion cannot be held without a prior literature review. The literature review can be included in the introduction or in a separate section. Besides, the discussion should be linked to the results - this aspect is missing.
There are too few sources of information in the part describing the Rivera Agency. This part of the article is a background to consider and should not be included in the discussion, but in the earlier parts of the article. If we were to support it with a document review - it could be part of the results.
6. Conclusion or Fine Considerations
In this section, the most important findings and managerial implication should be highlighted.
7. References
The bibliography is too poor. The methods emphasize that bibliographic research has been carried out - the article should contain the results of these analyzes, and the references should include the sources.
Good luck!
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
After reading the cover letter and the new text, I think that the manuscript has been sufficiently improved to warrant its publication in Social Sciences.
Reviewer 3 Report
The article has been refined, you can see a lot of effort put into improvement. In its present form, the text has gained in readability and scientific character. All comments were taken into account. The conducted research is interesting both from a scientific and utilitarian point of view.
