Assessing Public Spending Efficiency in 20 OECD Countries

Antonio Afonso and Mina Kazemi

No 2016/12, Working Papers Department of Economics from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa

Abstract: This study follows the framework of Afonso, Schuknecht, and Tanzi (2005), aiming to look at the public expenditure of 20 OECD countries for the period 2009-2013, from the perspective of efficiency and assess if these developed countries are performing efficiently compared to each other. Public Sector Performance (PSP) and Public Sector Efficiency (PSE) indicators were constructed and Data Envelopment Analysis was conducted. The results show that the only country that performed on the efficiency frontier is Switzerland. The average input-oriented efficiency score is equal to 0.732. That is, on average countries could have reduced the level of public expenditure by 26.8% and still achieved the same level of public performance. The average output-oriented efficiency score is 0.769 denoting that on average the sample countries could have increased their performance by 23.1% by employing the same level of public expenditure. Key Words : Public Spending, Technical Efficiency, Public Sector Performance (PSP), Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)

JEL-codes: C14 C87 H40 H50 Y10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://depeco.iseg.ulisboa.pt/wp/wp122016.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Assessing Public Spending Efficiency in 20 OECD Countries (2017)
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:ise:isegwp:wp122016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Department of Economics from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa Department of Economics, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa, Rua do Quelhas 6, 1200-781 LISBON, PORTUGAL.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vitor Escaria ().