Measuring Efficiency in Local Government: An Analysis of New South Wales Domestic Waste Management Function

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to measure the technical and scale efficiency of the domestic waste management function in 103 New South Wales’ local governments. After allowance is made for nondiscretionary environmental factors which may affect the provision of these local public services, such as congestion and the inability to operate machinery in densely-populated urban areas, comparison of efficiency across geographic/demographic criteria is made. The results suggests that, on average, waste management inputs could be reduced to just over 65 percent of the current level based upon observable best-practice whilst productivity losses due to scale effects account for slightly over 15 percent of total inputs. The results also indicate that inefficiency in urban developed councils is largely the result of congestion and other collection difficulties encountered in densely-populated areas, whilst inefficiency in regional and rural councils stems from an inability to attain an optimal scale of operations

Short- and long-term evaluation of efficiency and quality. An application to Spanish municipalities

This article analyses efficiency and quality levels in Spanish local governments and their determining factors through the application of the Data Envelopment Analysis methodology. It aims to discover to what extent inefficiency arises from both quality considerations and external factors beyond the organization's control, or alternatively, how much inefficiency is due to inadequate resource management. As a component of inadequate resource management, we test the existence of political-budgetary cycles in the temporal evolution of inefficiencies. The results show that on the whole there is still a wide margin within which local government efficiency and quality levels could be increased, although it is revealed that a great deal of inefficiency is due to exogenous or noncontrollable factors. In particular, it has been found that the size of the municipality, the per capita tax revenue, the per capita grants and the amount of commercial activity are some of the factors related with local government efficiency.