Decentralisation and Efficiency in Municipal Sports Services: Expenditure vs. Cost

Jorge Garcia-Unanue, Jose Luis Felipe, Leonor Gallardo, Carlos Majano and Gemma Perez-Lopez
Additional contact information
Jorge Garcia-Unanue: IGOID Research Group, Physical Activity and Sport Sciences Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 45071 Toledo, Spain
Jose Luis Felipe: School of Sport Sciences, Universidad Europea de Madrid, 28670 Villaviciosa de Odón (Madrid), Spain
Leonor Gallardo: IGOID Research Group, Physical Activity and Sport Sciences Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 45071 Toledo, Spain
Carlos Majano: IGOID Research Group, Physical Activity and Sport Sciences Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha, 45071 Toledo, Spain
Gemma Perez-Lopez: Accounting and Finance Department, Faculty of Business and Management, University of Granada, 18010 Granada, Spain

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-13

Abstract: The choice of service delivery form (direct management, agencification, or indirect management) is one of the most important decisions in the strategic planning of sports systems. However, its influence on efficiency has not been adequately studied in the scientific literature. The aim of this paper is to analyse the service delivery form of sports services on cost efficiency and to study the implications the use of different inputs has for the analysis of cost efficiency in sports services. To answer the objectives of the study, the analysis is divided into three stages. First, the cost efficiency of municipal sports services is estimated through the partial order-m robust frontiers using two different measures of cost (budgetary expenditures and effective cost). Then, the two cost-efficiency estimations were compared by the Li test to analyse the existence of significant differences. Finally, cost efficiency was regressed on several environmental factors by a bootstrapped truncated regression. The results show that there is no significant relationship between the different forms of management when the effective cost is included as an input. However, there is a significant relationship when the budgetary expenditure is specified as input; in this case, direct municipal management is the delivery form with the highest efficiency.

Keywords: economic efficiency; sport governance; two-step analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/4/2260/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/4/2260/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:4:p:2260-:d:502195

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().