Measuring local government efficiency is a complex task that has to take into account that they usually operate in a heterogeneous context. Therefore, the estimation of relative efficiency measures of their performance needs to account for the effect of contextual and exogenous variables on the production process. This should assure that the respective measures adequately reflect the portion of inefficiency that may be attributable to local authorities. In this paper, we apply time-dependent conditional frontier estimators to assess the performance of the 278 Portuguese mainland municipalities for the 2009-2014 period. By applying this nonparametric approach, we can avoid the strong assumptions on the specification of the estimated production function required by traditional two-stage methods. Furthermore, we examine the effect of contextual and exogenous variables on municipal efficiency levels and technological change. The results reveal that the recent local reforms introduced after the bailout agreement have slightly enhanced the performance of local authorities, but only for small and medium-sized municipalities.

Analyzing the efficiency of educational systems is one of the main focuses of the policy debate to promote national competitiveness and future economic growth. In this paper, we assess the performance of secondary schools from 36 countries (26 OECD countries and 10 partners) participating in PISA 2012. For this purpose, we apply a robust conditional nonparametric approach that allows us to incorporate the effect of contextual factors at both school and country level in the estimation of efficiency measures. Our results suggest that there is a greater heterogeneity across countries than across schools. Particularly, we find that differences in efficiency estimates are mainly explained by economic indicators and cultural values. In contrast, some factors previously identified as potential determinants of student achievement, like the existence of tracking or central examinations, do not seem to significantly affect the efficiency of secondary schools.

In a context of global transformation of care delivery in the Basque country in the study period, primary care units increased their efficiency. However, this effect was not larger in vertically integrated primary care providers.

In Latin American and Caribbean countries, the main concern of public health care managers has been traditionally placed on problems related to funding, payment mechanisms, and equity of access. However, more recently, there is a growing interest in improving the levels of efficiency and reducing costs in the provision of health services. In this paper we focus on measuring the technical efficiency and productivity change of public hospitals in Panama using bootstrapped Malmquist indices, which allows us to assess the statistical significance of changes in productivity, efficiency, and technology. Specifically, we are interested in comparing the performance of hospitals belonging to the two different management schemes coexisting in the country, the Social Security Fund (SSF) and the Ministry of Health (MoH). Our dataset includes data about 22 public hospitals (11 for each model) during the period between 2005 and 2015. The results showed that the productivity growth of hospitals belonging to the SSF has been much higher than that of the hospitals belonging to the Ministry of Health over the evaluated period (almost 4% compared to 1.5%, respectively). The main explanation for these divergences is the superior growth of technological change in the former hospitals, especially in the final years of the evaluated period.

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