Analyzing the Efficiency of County Road Production – Evidence from Eastern German Counties

Carolin Fritzsche

German Economic Review, 2019, vol. 20, issue 4, e415-e435

Abstract: This study analyzes the efficiency of the road production by local governments using data envelopment analysis. The production of roads is a costly public service, which makes an efficiency analysis in this field an interesting subject. I enhance the previous literature, first, by examining the differences in the efficiencies of eastern German counties while considering the deformation of the pavement and foundation of roads, which previous studies have not included due to data limitations. Second, I use a unique dataset on road quality for my efficiency analysis and show that the efficiency levels differ from those in studies that apply proxies, such as the number of accidents, to capture the quality of roads. These findings indicate that there is a great need to develop reliable variables to describe government services. Additionally, I show that the correlations between efficiency levels and county characteristics vary greatly depending on the quality indicator used.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/geer.12170

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:bla:germec:v:20:y:2019:i:4:p:e415-e435

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1465-6485

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Bernhard Felderer, Joseph F. Francois, Ivo Welch, Urs Schweizer and David E. Wildasin

More articles in German Economic Review from Verein für Socialpolitik Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().