Public Spending Efficiency in the OECD: Benchmarking Health Care, Education, and General Administration

Richard Dutu and Patrizio Sicari
Additional contact information
Patrizio Sicari: OCDE - Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Economiques = Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In many OECD countries, changes in demography and health conditions are putting pressure on public finance. To prevent further expansion of government spending as a percentage of GDP, public spending efficiency will need to be raised. This paper uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the efficiency of welfare spending (normalized by the working-age population) in a sample of OECD countries around 2012, focussing on health care, secondary education, and general public services. The DEA model has a two input-one output structure, with at least one of the variables representing a composite indicator controlling for country-specific factors (socio-economic environment and lifestyle factors, for example). We find wide dispersion in efficiency measures across OECD countries and provide possible quantified improvements for both output and input efficiency.

Keywords: Administration; DEA; education; efficiency; health care; nonparametric; public spending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published in Review of Economic Perspectives, 2020, 20 (3), ⟨10.2478/revecp-2020-0013⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Public Spending Efficiency in the OECD: Benchmarking Health Care, Education and General Administration (2016)
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:hal:journl:hal-03063308

DOI: 10.2478/revecp-2020-0013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().