The role of spatial interdependence in local government cost efficiency: An application to waste Italian sector

The paper aims to study the effect of spatial interdependence, among nearby municipalities, on public services efficiency. An empirical analysis on the waste disposal service in 4250 Italian municipalities was carried out to evaluate the efficiency of waste management expenditure, once the impact of positive/negative externalities, of neighbouring local governments, on efficiency levels is isolated. From a methodological point of view, our study extends the spatial stochastic frontier methodology proposed in Fusco & Vidoli (2013) usable only for production analysis, allowing to admit into a cost frontier the spatial autocorrelation among residuals. Ignoring spatial autocorrelation leads to inferential problems violating one of the most important assumption of classical regression models: the non-correlation of the residuals. We found a significant spatial interdependence among neighbouring municipalities in term of cost efficiency, that, thanks to the methodology proposed, has been isolated allowing a discussion on the specific efficiency of municipalities. These results may suggest the need to consider proximity effects in future investigations about the efficiency of waste management and, more generally, of public services.     

Long-term efficiency of public service provision in a context of budget restrictions. An application to the education sector

This paper proposes an extension of the non-parametric long-term evaluation of efficiency, the conditional panel data DEA model, which takes into account the panel structure of the data and, at the same time, incorporates the role of contextual factors in the estimations. Its application to the education sector for the period analyzed (2009–2014) shows the utility of this method, since it obtains more representative efficiency scores for the complete time-period, is more robust to external shocks, and allows improvements to the decision-making process in the allocation of the budget available for the public education sector. The results are clear and present an evolution towards the convergence of the efficiency scores, precisely in a time period when hard budget constraints severely reduced the resources available for public schools.     

Assessing the technical efficiency of public procurements in the bus transportation sector in the Czech Republic

This article examines public procurements in the regional bus transportation sector. The data were collected exclusively for this research from regional offices in the Czech Republic. This study does not propose to estimate the cost function for bus operators, as do most efficiency studies. Rather, it’ focuses on identifying the factors that influence the final price offered by participants in the tender. Knowing these factors will help to properly set the tender conditions, which can further help to improve how well the bus operator functions, and to reduce public subsidies. The study also aims to estimate the technical efficiency rate by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and find the implications of efficiency scoring for tender conditions. This statistic also enables contract owners to compare the cost differences between individual bus service providers and examine companies that operate at the efficiency frontier.