Economies of scale in local government services: a meta analysis / Siew King Ting, Rene Villano and Brian Dollery.

In this paper, a meta-regression analysis is presented by 38 empirical studies on the size of scale in various local government services. Our results show that income classification was the most important factor in determining size of scale and all selected local government services recorded decreasing size of scale in the recent decades, with water services exhibiting the largest decreasing size of scale. The existence of scale effects has important ramifications for local government structural reform, given the globally indifferent results of local government reorganizatio

Understanding Market Demand for Sweet Potato in Papua New Guinea

Sweet potato is the most important food crop in Papua New Guinea, grown by the majority of households throughout the country. In recent years, it has become an important source of income for smallholder farmers in a developing market economy at a time when demand is rising in urban centers, especially in coastal cities such as Lae and Port Moresby (POM). A transformation from subsistence to commercial farming requires new skills and a change of mindsets from production orientation to market orientation. A starting point is better understanding of what the market wants. The objective of the study was to understand the market requirements in POM of both consumers and institutional buyers through a consumer survey (350 households) and informant interviews (25 institutional buyers), respectively. The results show that while the demand for sweet potato is increasing in some segments of the POM market, rice poses a serious threat to the longer-term prospects of the sweet potato sector. Furthermore, the majority of consumers surveyed indicate a clear preference for some sweet potato varieties and associated product attributes, but lack of product information leads to confusion and high search costs. By contrast, institutional buyers demand good quality products and consistency in supply. The conclusion is that the sweet potato sector must improve its product quality and supply consistency, as well as reduce the marketing cost, in order to compete with rice and other food crops by changing their current postharvest and marketing practices

An empirical analysis of administrative economic efficiency in Sabah local government: A dea application Siew King Ting, Brian Dollery and Rene Villano

Malaysian local government reform has been addressed through various public policies aimed at improving its performance over the decades. An important question which arises is whether these technological and management programs have translated into performance gains, particularly in the corporate centres of local authorities (LAs). Using a panel data of two inputs and four outputs from 2000 to 2012, a two-stage double bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method is employed to estimate administrative technical efficiency (TE) in the corporate centres of 17 LAs in the Malaysian state of Sabah. The results showed an overall inadequate mean of TE scores and minor fluctuations in TE scores over the years under analysis, illustrating the rigidity of management performance. On average, the LAs recorded TE scores of 0.52, which implied that the LAs should be able to increase output by 48% while maintaining the same amount of input. The big urban LAs performed better with the TE scores of 0.60; while the small urban LAs recorded lower TE scores of 0.43. Further analysis demonstrated that the environmental variable, urban population bore a negative relationship to the TE scores. Several public policy recommendations are propose