| Abstract: | This paper employs Network Data Envelopment Analysis (NDEA) to measure the municipality performance. The NDEA approach allows to have a more comprehensive evaluation of the municipality performance if compared to traditional DEA. The proposed NDEA model aims at shedding new light on the efficiency-effectiveness relationship in the provision of social services by municipalities. Municipal efficiency and effectiveness are combined to generate a single performance measure which can be considered as a proxy measure of the value for money of municipality services. A sample including 103 major Italian municipalities is used as a case to implement the proposed model. Findings indicate that there is no trade-off between the efficiency and effectiveness components of the overall municipal performance score, but rather they appear to be preconditions of each other. Therefore, higher level of performance can be achieved without conflicting one against the other. Furthermore, only 6 municipalities achieve the highest performance level, suggesting that there is still room for improving the performance of a great number of municipalities. |
