Some Determinants of Intermediate Local Governments' Spending Efficiency: The Case of French Départements

Maria Nieswand and Stefan Seifert

No 1130, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements in metropolitan France in 2008. Spending efficiency is measured using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Results indicate significant room for improvements and detect spending inefficiencies averaging between 10 and 22 percent, depending on model specification. To explain efficiency, a bootstrapped truncated regression, following Simar and Wilson (2007), is applied. The second-stage regression shows that efficiency is also determined by exogenous factors and identifies the distance to the national capital, inhabitants' income and the share of inhabitants of an age over 65 as significant determinants of efficiency.

Keywords: Intermediate government spending efficiency; nonparametric efficiency analysis; bootstrapped truncated regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 H11 H72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 p.
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-eur, nep-pbe and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.372972.de/dp1130.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1130

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek (bibliothek@diw.de).