Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 29th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG5: Public Finance and Public Financial Mngmt. (Physical) Author(s) Marek Jetmar AMBIS University Prague 8 Liben Czech Republic Jan Kubát Title Application of the non-parametric DEA method to analyse the effectiveness of selected services provided by municipalities, example of primary schools File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Marek Jetmar Abstract Efficiency is often understood as the relationship between inputs (costs) that should be spent economically (there should be no waste of material and human resources) and outputs of the public organization's activities. It is about the effectiveness of the results of the activity, ie. what benefit the client has when consuming the result of the activity of a public institution. Different methods and tools are used to objectify the costs and inputs of public sector organizations. Most often, these are comparative methods based on an institutional comparison of the cost per unit of production of specific public goods, or even a territorial comparison. The aim of our research is to find out whether the Data envelopment analysis (DEA) can be applied for monitoring the effectiveness of the provision of public services at the level of municipalities in the Czech Republic. DEA is a non-parametric method for the estimation of the production frontier (or, more precisely, the best-practice frontier) introduced by Charnes et al. (1978). It measures technical efficiency of a decision making unit relatively to other units in the sample. The units that form the frontier are classified as efficient while the units not on the frontier are considered as inefficient. Inefficient units are further assigned efficiency score measuring their shortcomings. Our research team uses data about inputs and outputs for the area of primary education, local public libraries, road maintance, municipal police service, providing services of municipal authorities. For the same time periods, we have expenditures of municipalities by type and sector breakdown (system MONITOR of the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic). We can identify the relevant costs at the level of items and sections. (current, ie. operating expenses). The population size of municipalities and their distance to development centers defined by the Regional Development Strategy of the Czech Republic 2021-2027 (regional metropoles, centers with more than 10,000 inhabitants and so-called third-type municipalities) became the sorting criteria. Formally, we have set of sixteen municipality categories, taking into account their population size, spatial distance to the higher-ranked settlements, as well as the degree of delegation of powers. We analyse efficiency of primary schools established by Czech municipalities during the years 2016-2018. In total, there are 2 560 primary schools in the 2018. For the efficiency analysis, we consider the following variables: -Total Expenditures (excluding wages a other levies), Number of Pupils and Number of School Classes. Our aim is to verify the effectiveness of this method for assessing the efficiency of this particular public service. Based on DEA testing for other areas of community activities, we will be able to formulate general conclusions on the applicability of this method. Our research shows that efficiency increases not only with the size of the seat (examined in the context of the whole data set), but also the average efficiency within the size categories studied increases with the increase of the population.
